February 2020
MsWas's Message Corner
Hello CBR12 participants and friends of Cannonball Read,
If you've been looking at reviews recently, you may have noticed that the box for the links to Amazon at the bottom of reviews isn't showing up. We're currently in a dispute with Amazon over their terms of agreement for affiliate accounts, so ours is (hopefully just temporarily) down. We should hear something final within the week. For now, I ask that you still fill in that required field just in case we can resume those links.
As for us, the loss of the affiliate accounts is quite a loss for our fundraising efforts. Proceeds from Amazon made up about 20% of last year's total. Still, our mission continues to donate to the American Cancer Society any proceeds that the site generates above what’s required to run/maintain it on the server. I donate all of my time, as do our volunteers. (We do contract with an awesome developer to run and troubleshoot our points system and other more complicated programming. Most of the other site maintenance is done by me.)
Please consider making a donation today to help us offset this loss. You can donate through Paypal; Venmo (cannonball-read); and Google Pay (to Gmail address mswas.cannonballread@gmail.com). You can also support us by buying CBR merchandise on RedBubble, and sharing links to get more traffic to the group blog.
Let's keep sticking it to cancer, one book at a time!
Take care and Happy Reading!
Bonnie (aka "MsWas")
Q&A with a Cannonballer: Rachel
 The readership loves your end-of-post stats! Have you always tracked how long it took you to finish a book, etc., or did you start that for CBR?
I started tracking how long it took me to read a book several years ago. Goodreads makes it very simple for me to track all of my books, even when I started and finished reading based on when I update my progress in a book. Before Goodreads, I used a good old pen and paper, and I have tracked every book I have read since the eighth grade! Participating in CBR helps me remember what I read since I attempt to write a thoughtful review.
#CannonBookClub
We're doing some fun stuff with this year's #CannonBookClubs! On March 20 and 21, we're doing a Station Eleven reread to get ready for Emily St. John Mandel's next book, The Glass Hotel. June 19 and 20 we’ll be celebrating Pride Month the Cannonball way with The Future is Queer book club focusing on speculative and science fiction written by and/or featuring LGBTQ+ characters. See the announcement post for the choices.
Each #CannonBookClub discussion will take place over two days so folks from all sorts of time zones can jump in. The main discussion will be on the group blog, on a discussion post that goes up the first day. If you're thirsty for even more discussion, you can also chime in on our social media. Here's the schedule so far. Stay tuned for more details!
- Station Eleven - March 20-21
- The Future is Queer theme - June 19-20
- The Glass Hotel - October 16-17
New category: Fanfiction
Fanfiction is now an option in what you read this year. Just make sure that your review is long enough (250+ words), especially if it’s a part of a multi-book review. If your book is not listed on Amazon, in the book info field, please add the information of the original book that your Fanfiction is about. Then in your review, either at the top or the bottom, mention and link to the Fanfiction source.
You'll see the Fanfiction option in the Edit Post> Categories menu. (We use Wordpress "categories" for our Genres.) Select that and publish.
Helpful tips and tricks
Double check your numbers
When you see the review number in the footer of your most recent review, does it match what you think you should have? In the above example, kimberleybear has posted review No:3, with lots of descriptive tags, the number of stars she would give it, and the number of comments the post has so far. So don't forget to fill out your tags and choose a star rating, and double check to make sure Wordpress is calculating your reviews correctly. If not, let MsWas know.
If you happen to scroll all the way down on the Wordpress page while you're composing your review, remember to leave the CBR12 Review Number and CBR12 Review Total fields alone. Those are admin-only fields:
CBR11 recap
If you want to see something impressive, check out the CBR11 recap over on Pajiba. We reviewed 5,349 books and raised $1,675 for the American Cancer Society! Go team! That beats our 4,390 reviews from CBR10. I can't wait to see how we do for CBR12! You can help increase our fundraising this year by donating to CBR.
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Mar 01, 2021 11:29 pm
A Dead Djinn in Cairo is like a bonbon. It’s perfect exactly as it is, but it leaves you wanting more, more, more. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the interesting woman in the sharp suit, and we are dropped into her world with little fanfare. In Clark’s Cairo of 1912, the British and the French tried to colonize Egypt, but the sudden arrival of magical creatures drove them out. Some 40 years earlier, man named Al-Jahiz opened a portal allowing all kinds of djinn, magic […]
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Mar 01, 2021 10:44 pm
The Midnight Library follows a woman name Nora Seed who has a pretty sad life: dead end job, bad apartment, dead cat, no friends, dead mom. So she decides to take her own life by overdosing. After laying down to die, she finds herself in this kind of interstitial space of a weirdly magical library with infinite books of all the infinite lives she could have lived. The librarian is a woman from her past, Mrs. Elm, who helped her through her father’s death. Mrs. […]
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Mar 01, 2021 07:28 pm
I got this book as a holiday gift from a friend whose book taste I trust implicitly. She told me she hadn’t been able to put it down when she read it. I was skeptical — I’m just not really a non-fiction person. In fact, I’m pretty sure this was my first-ever memoir written by a non-celebrity. I usually just want to sit with a story and not think about real life. Why would I want to spend my precious book time reading about someone […]
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Mar 01, 2021 05:44 pm
As somone who grew up reading Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, I love a good mystery. If I had it to do again, I would definitely have chosen the audiobook for this since it has such strong Serial podcast vibes. In Fairview a beautiful and popular senior, Andie Bell, was murdered five years ago by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. The tragedy has haunted this small town and the people who knew the families involved. Now five years later, 17 year old Pip […]
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Mar 01, 2021 04:38 pm
I decided to read The Bellweather Rhapsody based on jomidi’s Cannonball Read review. I’m a sucker for a locked door mystery, especially when it involves a group of strangers trapped in a remote location with a murderer. Content warning: Suicide, both completed and attempted. The completed suicide is described in a fair amount of detail. Domestic abuse is mentioned. In 1982, twelve year-old Minnie Graves decides to explore the Bellweather Hotel after her older sister’s wedding. She stumbles upon another new bride moments after she […]
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Amanda Howard (aka "Bothari43")
The Cannonball Read Newsletter Editor
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