Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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CoffeeShopReader's Reviews:

Love and A** Tulips

Flowers and Their Meanings by Karen Azoulay

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Most people probably have some general awareness of the language of flowers even if they’ve never heard the term; at minimum I’d wager most anyone you ask would know that a rose usually symbolizes love, and if you were lucky you might even get someone whose knows some of the color distinctions (white = innocence or purity, yellow for jealousy, etc). Flowers and Their Meanings goes beyond that; in addition to reviewing the origins and general history of the use of flower symbolism in England, […]

Quotable Tomato History

Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World by William Alexander

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Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World is presented as both history and investigation, and it’s got a lot of both. It’s pretty readable for non-fiction based in science, but the biggest thing it’s got going for it is a lot of interesting facts that don’t necessarily always go together. There’s some tension in the narration and story-telling, and the factual reporting, but overall it’s a pretty decent read. No wonder I have to give it back to the library without a renewal (someone’s already put […]

Fellow CBR reviewer for the win

Komarr by Lois Bujold

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I typically get bored or annoyed before completing most long sci-fi or fantasy sagas; Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is the lone exception so far. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga has the potential to join that tiny club, although to be fair, I’ve only read one, Komarr. I’m pretty sure I saw someone’s rave review on here, but I’m sorry I don’t remember whose it was. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this series before then, but I’m glad to have found it. Komarr is both very […]

Not on the bandwagon for this series

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

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Throne of Glass sounded promising and it’s been on my list for a while. I finally picked it up; it starts off well, but then it seems to forget about the actual plot and focuses on the romantic possibilities of the incredibly obvious possible triangle between Celaena, Chaol, and Dorian, and the courtly scheming, mostly by two totally underdeveloped characters who might actually rather deserve each other. There is some supernatural evil looming in the background the whole time, but that too is pretty predictable […]

Check in for the research, checked out for some of the recipes

Plant-Powered Protein by Nava Atlas

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I’m getting a little tired of the plant based meat substitute trends in cookbooks, which seems to still be going strong. Still, I picked up Plant-Powered Protein out of curiosity, and it’s actually got some interesting things in it. Two of the best parts is the review in an appendix of the nutritional properties of many plant-based meats that are becoming increasingly commercially common. It’s not a full nutrition label for everything, but it is a list of the major brands ,what they tend to […]

Professorial Rant Ahead

Why Do We Say That? by Scott Matthews

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When I teach History of English to English majors, I have an etymology assignment where they have to find the origins of a figure of speech. The hardest part of that assignment is almost always finding a reputable scholarly source to support whatever phrase you’ve chosen. Naturally when I saw Why Do We Say That? On the library shelf, I was hopeful. I was shortly thereafter disappointed. This book is indeed a collection of 101 idiomatic phrases (and most of them count as figurative) that […]



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