Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Caitlin_D

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I skipped CBR for 2020 because I was expecting my first child and knew time would be finite. Then the world imploded and I missed the crap out of y'all. Plus I read so much less without y'all's recommendations! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Caitlin_D's Quick Questions interview.)

Caitlin_D's Reviews:

“It’s a brave new world, Mr. Portman, And we’ll be right behind you.”

A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) by Ransom Riggs

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No exaggeration- it took me an entire month to finish Ransom Rigg’s Map of Days. I could say that the lure of television, the Internet and an endless calendar of holiday activities that impeded my ability to complete the fourth installment of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is this was an awful book but the completionist in me felt determined to ride it out. I had actually planned this to be my ‘This is the End’ bingo square […]

“We eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.”

Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi

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Happy New Year’s Eve Eve, welcome to my last minute slew of reviews to catch myself up before CBR10 officially comes to a close! I’m a big Top Chef fan, despite my occasionally toddler like food preferences,  and was pleasantly surprised by host Padma Lakshmi’s memoir which covered both her career and personal life. She opens with her courtship and marriage to Salam Rushdie which, besides Top Chef, may be the thing she is most famous for doing. While her dissection of her failed marriage […]

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

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I received From Crook to Cook as part of the Cannonball gift exchange and it combined two of my favorite things- cooking and celebrity memoir- while adding a dose of rapper realness, although infinitely more readable than Gucci Mane, so while I never would have purchased this for myself it was the ideal gift.  From Crook to Cook has something for everyone. The cooking purist can revel in Martha Stewart’s foreword, the celebrity voyeur will appreciate Snoop’s candor including snaps from his kitchen and some of his favorite […]

“I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.”

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I wonder if my lack of December reading progress has more to do with being busy with the holidays, my having already reached me 2018 reading goal or if it is because I have spent the last two weeks either depressed by or disappointed in my book choice. Perhaps it is a combination of the three. Everyone Brave is Forgiven focuses on three main characters who live in England at the onset of World War II. The novel opens with society girl Mary North who volunteers […]

Unfortunately timed (although appropriately titled) memoir

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I listened to the audio version of Unqualified by Anna Faris and the whole time I kept thinking how awkward it must have been for Anna to have this memoir come out about two months after she announced her divorce to Chris Pratt. There is some hasty editing that alludes to the past tense of their relationship but there are a few essays that probably needed a second look; hell she dedicated the book to Pratt alone (when they have a kid together) and while he wrote […]

“Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.”

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Trigger Warning: sexual assault  I do not know much about hockey, I live in Texas and while Dallas has an NHL team the whole sport tends to fly under my radar, but you don’t need to know anything about hockey to be enraptured by Beartown. Saying I “enjoyed” Beartown doesn’t seem right, it isn’t a particularly enjoyable story, but like A Man Called Ove Backman delivers a very sad but beautiful story this time about life in a small Swedish town whose entire focus is on their youth hockey team. I’ve […]



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