August 2020
MsWas's Message Corner
Hello CBR12 participants and friends of Cannonball Read,
First, I want to express my sincere wishes that you and yours are healthy and doing well during the pandemic. For those of you who signed up for CBR12 back before things got so crazy, I know very well how hard things have become, let alone adding anything extra onto your plate like writing reviews. If you haven’t been reading, I get it. If you’ve started books and didn’t finish, I get that too. If you’ve read a bunch but haven’t been reviewing, welcome to the club, it’s a big one with a lot of fabulous members. It's really ok.
I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t reach out and offer some info on how you can get past some types of CBR problems and how you can still help our mission if you can’t get to posting. The main one is review amnesty - you never have to review every book you’ve read. Read my full post explaining that further and more ways to help stick it to cancer, one book at a time.
I’m proud to say we’ve got a great community going as part of Cannonball Read, and we’re trying to make it grow even in the hardest of times. We’re still focused on our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time in supporting the American Cancer Society, and our flourishing community helps so much. I hope you can join us in some way.
Best wishes to you, and I hope you have plenty of books to read!
Bonnie (aka "MsWas")
Q&A with a Cannonballer: getoffmylawnn
What was it that first helped you fall in love with reading?
I love this question! I credit my interest in reading to my Dad, who was an avid and prolific reader of everything he could get his hands on (he got me my first library subscription at the age of 5) and my maternal uncle who would scour the second hand shops in Mumbai for rare and funny books for a pre-teen me (he too bought me a subscription at a small library just for my summer vacations I spent with him). My interest in illustrated books was a direct result of the (now rare) Russian and Chinese illustrated books easily available in the early to late 80s. Publishers like Raduga and Misha magazine and the delightful Chinese stories I read as right from when I could hold a book is what started me and I hope I never stop being delighted by a book, any book, forever.
Bingo Check-in
The 30 of you Bingoing this year are off to an amazing start already. Visit the check-in post for encouragement, ideas, scoreboards, and general merriment.
Make sure you put cbr12bingo in the tags at the bottom of your review to make sure all your Bingo entries get counted. Keep up the good work!
For sale: Books!
Are your libraries and bookstores still closed? Don't worry, CBR has you covered! We're having our first-ever book sale. We've got nonfiction, children's books, Terry Pratchett, a couple things about the secret history of the CIA, in case that's a thing you're into, and more! Plus, there's a couple of gifty things. Check out the shipping details and the book list!
Statistically speaking
Ingres77 is back to his old tricks, awesomely compiling the evidence of how awesome you all are. He even faced down a hurricane while mathing! Also, if you feel like you're struggling with reading and/or reviewing right now, check out the comments - you are definitely not alone. (And please see MsWas's message above, and here, about review amnesty.)
Do you have plans for Sunday?
August 9 is National Book Lovers Day! According to Wikipedia, this is an "unofficial holiday observed to encourage bibliophiles celebrate reading and literature. People are advised to put away their smartphones and every possible technological distraction and pick up a book to read." I think we can handle that, don't you, fellow bibliophiles?
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Aug 06, 2020 01:15 pm
Reading this book in early/mid-March 2020 was a huge error in judgement on my part. I guess I thought immersing myself in a plague story would lessen my anxieties about the real world. It…didn’t work. Having said this, Year of Wonders was truly a captivating read with a dynamic heroine who faces the horrors of the plague on and comes out on the other side deeply changed. Anna Frith is a somewhat timid young widow in a small English village who is making ends […]
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Aug 06, 2020 10:47 am
Of the early Bridgerton books I loved books three and four, really liked the first, and thought the second was okay on my first read through. The good news headline of this reread review is that I liked this book more the second time through than I did the first. The plot of the book is a bit thinner than its predecessor, but that isn’t a bad thing. In The Viscount Who Loved Me we follow Anthony and Kate as they maneuver through the 1814 […]
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Aug 06, 2020 09:29 am
CBR12Bingo – Shelfie These three books are not connected in any meaningful way except that I happened to buy all of them earlier in the summer from Thriftbooks and randomly chose to read them at the same time, switching off for a few reasons. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes ended up being a little more boring and dense that I had hoped, so the balance of the Walter Tevis stories helped, and while I really enjoy the Will Cuppy pieces, they are too similar to one another to […]
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Aug 06, 2020 09:15 am
CBR12Bingo – Yellow This is a recently published memoir that is presented as a family history. Sarah Broom grew up in New Orleans East, a community that others would give her looks when she mentioned it to strangers, and as the youngest of twelve children, she tells the story of her grandparents, her parents, her siblings, herself, and the house at the center of their lives. The memoir tells the family history and its strength here is giving us a series of events from […]
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Aug 06, 2020 09:02 am
The Caine Mutiny – 5/5 Stars A truly wonderful, carefully plotted and thoughtful war and anti-war novel from Herman Wouk, for which he won the Pulitzer in 1952 or so. The novel takes place mainly aboard the “USS Caine,” a minesweeper destroyer that is mostly stationed in Pearl Harbor and other naval bases, and who’s job is to tow artillery targets, clear shipping lanes, and minesweep. In a pinch, it could be used to fight submarines, but that is not the fate here of this […]
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Amanda Howard (aka "Bothari43")
The Cannonball Read Newsletter Editor
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