Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Blingle Bells

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Bio mom to a wild-haired five-year-old spitfire, foster mom to a three-year-old hooligan. Wife to a nurse. I spend my days tripping over dogs and putting out fires.

Blingle Bells's Reviews:

Reviewing this makes ME feel like an alien.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

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Without a doubt, I have grown more as a reader since I started doing CBR a few years ago than in my entire 20+ years reading before it. It’s still comforting and thrilling to read books that are exactly the reason I love to read, but going completely outside of my genre is a different kind of experience. Fulfilling. I read Cannonball reviews (along with Pajiba and every other blog or news source I follow) through Feedly, and my only “rules” for myself are that […]

Is it too soon to call my favorite book of 2019?

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky

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You guys, I could not put this book down. It was also kind of like eating a Twix bar hidden in a Fiber One bar wrapper, because whenever anyone asked me what I was reading and I said that it was a memoir about the hotel industry and I couldn’t tear myself away from it long enough to function, for whatever reason the topic struck people as a much more dry and scholarly than it was. And I really don’t know why – what goes […]

“Nothing … was private: only secret, only silent. We ate our tears.”

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

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  This book is so wildly out of my wheelhouse that I don’t really feel qualified to assess it. I’ve almost never read science fiction and rarely read short story collections, and I’m sure I’ve never read a book that was both. There were some stories I loved and some I hated (luckily, the longer novella at the end hit a solid “liked a lot” on that scale), but without a doubt I now have tremendous respect for Le Guin as a writer. It’s astonishing […]

I hope this isn’t how I’ll be going on.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

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I’ve been seeing the phrase “start as you mean to go on” flying around a lot as we collectively, tentatively tiptoe into 2019. 2018 was an utter disaster for me, and although 2019 is better so far – touch would, knock on wood, hug wood – I’m afraid of jinxing myself. I can’t say that I’m glad I read Zombie, and I very much hope it’s not how the year continues in terms of reading or anything else. I want to add the qualifier, “It’s not a bad book,” […]

“Health and dignity are indissociable in human beings.”

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It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how interesting a book like this may be to someone else, because when asked about my fantasy dream career, I say epidemiologist. And not the fun kind – the data wonk kind. I think objectively, this book is objectively “exciting” if you have a tolerance for fairly dry excitement, and a lot of details on slow, frustrating, painstaking searches for pathogens, outbreaks, sources of contamination, and underlying causes of the things that plague us. Despite the rather dramatic […]

“…Let me assure you, Lula – nobody’s normal.”

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I was so reluctant to start this book. The cover just screams “twee” and “manic pixie dream girl” but someone here, who knows who, had written a sufficiently glowing review that it made it to my TBR list and well – there are rules. Once it’s on the TBR, I have to at least try it. But believe me, I wouldn’t have otherwise. And man would I have missed out. Weird Girl and What’s His Name is such a sweet, tender, funny book. The pace […]



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