Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Sophia

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I love to read, and I love to learn. I wish I were retired so I could spend more time on my random hobbies!

Sophia's Reviews:

Swedish serial killer short stories

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Turston

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I’m not sure who picked An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (2018) by Helene Turston for book club, but I do remember that we were all interested in something short. This book includes four short stories originally written in Swedish. They are all about one elderly Swedish woman and the people she kills. I came into this expecting something a little different than what I got, and this is mainly to do with the blurb on Amazon. Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with […]

Love, Actually is not a good movie

Shit, Actually by Lindy West

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I found Shit, Actually by Lindy West on my trusty and much anticipated NPR’s Best Books of 2020 List. It looked like a fun, entertaining read with a little feminist twist, so I was happy to pick it up. Shit, Actually is a book filled with short essays. Each essay is a pithy review of a well-known movie. Actually, it’s less of review than it is a rehashing of the movie with commentary. It reminded me of CinemaSins, a Youtube channel that I find very entertaining (especially when I need to […]

It’s good, but it made me cringe

Luster by Raven Leilani

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I was very excited to see Barack Obama’s reading list come out at the end of 2020, and I immediately added some of his recommendations to my reading list. One of these was Luster (2020) by Raven Leilani. It wasn’t just Barack Obama who noticed this one: Luster was also on the best books list of NPR, Oprah, and many others. Edie is a young, black woman in her 20’s. She lives in Brooklyn and does administrative work at a production company. Her mother killed herself and her father […]

“Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”

Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

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My book club has been focusing on short books lately because we’ve all felt so busy and overwhelmed. A friend of mine chose Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (2019) for our next book. This book is exactly what you’d think from the title. It might be odd to read a style book for a book club, but we’re a bunch of lawyers who regularly argue about this kind of thing. It was really kind of perfect for us. (Dreyer told me not to use […]

I wish this book had been around when I was in high school

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

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I saw that Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Text Book Got Wrong (2018) by James W. Loewen was available on audiobook from my library, and I decided to give it a try. I took AP U.S. History and AP European History in high school. I did well in those classes, but I didn’t love them. I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth biographies about historical people, but the grand sweep of those high school classes was boring. Fortunately, I took enough history classes in college […]

It’s too late for the children

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

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I first saw A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet on NPR’s Best Books of 2020. It immediately caught my attention, but then I saw it was a finalist for the National Book Award and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. It felt like fate was telling me to read this book. All I knew going into it was that it was some kind of allegory for climate change. Evie is our narrator. She’s probably fifteen or sixteen years old. Her parents have […]



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