Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Did not expect to love a book about economics and baseball but here we are

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

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I know far more about baseball than someone with my level of interest (mild) should. I have favourite players (Mookie Betts and Corey Seager), a lot of thoughts on player hair and facial hair (Cody Bellinger’s haircut, Seager’s unfortunate ‘goatee’) and I even know the team’s GM (Dave Roberts). In short: I live with a baseball fanatic (Dodgers fan, obviously) and have essentially absorbed these things, osmosis style from the many, many games that play in the background to my daily life during baseball season […]

So, Do You Like Knives?

The Martial Arts of Indonesia: A Guide to Pencak Silat, Kuntao and Traditional Weapons by Donn F. Draeger

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  Yes, I am really amusing myself here for picking a ‘sportsball’ book where balls don’t really feature in the sports of focus. To make up for that though—as I discovered—nearly everything else that you could think of has been used as a weapon in an Indonesian martial art at some point. This includes knives, more knives, swords, shields, sticks, more knives, whips, chains, and teeth. And the knives? More knives than spam in Monty Python. Some of these people folks really love their knives. […]

“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small.”

Björnstad (Beartown) by Fredrick Backman

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CBR13 Bingo: Sports Ball (could easily also be used as Rec’d, since a lot of Cannonballers have read and reviewed it favourably) Official book description: People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better […]

“Love couldn’t solve everything, but without love, there was nothing to solve.” (Bingo #3!)

40-Love by Olivia Dade

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I think I laugh the most whenever I read an Olivia Dade romance, her humor hits all the right notes for me. Even when I’m not expecting a laugh, Dade delivers them through her characters who are achingly self-aware, or sometimes not. Following a meet-cute involving a runaway bikini top and the need to keep from flashing nearby children, we get the story of Tess and Lucas. Lucas, 26, a former top-level tennis pro now giving lessons at a Florida resort, fled there after the […]

Part Fantasy, Part Messianic Fever Dream

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

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Cbr13bingo Sportsball Here’s one of those rare (for me) cases of the movie being better than the book. Shoeless Joe, the basis for the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, is a decent-ish fantasy swathed in backward looking heteronormative tropes where a beleaguered white messiah-figure brings redemption to all around him. The parts of the story that interested me involved the baseball field and the players from the past who were resurrected when main character Ray Kinsella built it in his cornfield. Unfortunately, those […]

Minor minor league hockey romance. #CBRBINGO – Sportsball

Breakaway (Scoring Chances, #1) by Avon Gale

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 3/30 This was a good time. I was really into it at the beginning, but then the tension sort of fizzled out near the middle. It had a pretty strong ending, though. I’m definitely going to check out later books in the series, because some of the summaries seem like they will be a little more angsty. This was mostly just bantery and fluffy and full of hockey stuff. I almost bumped it up to four stars, but that […]



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