This book is probably not what you’re expecting. It’s mostly photos, and it’s about closed “insane asylums.” Are there spooky photos of sweeping, ruined staircases? Yep. Rooms piled high with abandoned, old-fashioned medical equipment? You bet. Peeling paint? Pages of it. Overgrown grounds? Yes. That is what we’ve come to expect (or at least what I have come to expect) from books about defunct mental institutions, and this one technically delivers that. The difference is the entire tone. In the 10 or 15 dense pages […]
Getting woke for beginners.
It’s kind of hard to review this book without sounding like a jackass. I really wanted to love it based on the salty cover and title, and I think I was just really prepared to be the “you” in question, get called on my bullshit, and, well, do better. Luvvie is a super likable and engaging writer, and parts of it were great. The first half was more about her views and anecdotes on life, people, friendship, money, dating. Nothing groundbreaking but there was some […]
In which my sweet Granny comes up once again.
I guess I should’ve expected how close to home this would hit: the subtitle sums it up. It revolves around the oral histories of women who were sent to homes for unwed mothers in the 1940s-1960s, their nearly-always coerced adoptions, their lives after surrendering, their reunions if they ever occurred. I am part of a birth family: my mother relinquished my two younger siblings for adoption, and it defined my childhood. Adoption is such a sore nerve, I almost never read about it. Besides which, […]
A book that does what it set out to do.
I know that’s a very vague title, but it’s weird to call this book great when it’s so tragic. It wasn’t great, but it was effective. I had a very hard time putting it down. It’s the story of the 2013 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, a city that is hit incessantly by tornadoes. They’ve gotten bigger, stronger, and weirder in recent years and no one knows why. The Mercy of the Sky tells the story of the tornado from many different residents’ perspectives, from meteorologists to […]
A genre made just for me, I think.
Two years ago, I converted to Catholicism. I was raised Lutheran, identified as kinda Lutheran-by-default for most of my life, dabbled in Unitarianism, and settled into an indifferent agnosticism that seems pretty common in my generation – a kind of “how am I supposed to know if God exists, but I can vouch for the fact that a whole lot of Christians are real assholes” thing. Then I got engaged to a lapsed Catholic, and we both started having some God-related restlessness and feeling some […]
Done like Myspace. Done like wristbands for causes.
Two themes have emerged for my 2017 Cannonball progress: 1) being pleasantly surprised by books written by celebrities (Cravings, Bossypants, Troublemaker), and 2) clearing my 24 page Goodreads to-read list of a bunch of “humor books” I added in 2009 when they were kinda new and I thought they were funny. You know the kind I mean: People of Walmart…as a book! Or something that wasn’t so horrifically exploitative in the first place, but just majorly stops being funny after half a decade and […]
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