Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ingres77

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I've been doing this since 2015, and though I'm not going to read a hundred books a year, I plan on doing this for the foreseeable future. I also maintain the Cannonball Read database, and make infrequent updates on our reading habits. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ingres77's Quick Questions interview.)

ingres77's Reviews:

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]

I was misinformed, then I was wrong, and now I’m at a loss over a 20 year old tragedy

Columbine by Dave Cullen

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I started this review on April 15th with the line, “I don’t like the style of this book.” Which was true at the time, and ultimately led me to abandon reading it until a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite podcast discoveries this year has been one called Martyrmade. It’s a history podcast in the style of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, heavily detailed with long episodes. The man who makes Martyrmade, Darryl Cooper, has another podcast (which I do not recommend, by the way), […]

May stat round-up!

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I’ve tallied the yearly totals for most users going back to CBR3, and (assuming their review counts are accurate), there are more than 20,134 reviews since 2011. The database currently has over 14,000 reviews, so I’m about 73% of the way complete. That makes me feel better. On with the stats! May stats: 280 reviews (May 2016 saw 275 reviews) Average rating: 3.64 stars (May: 3.69) Most popular book: Life Moves Pretty Fast (Hadley Freeman) and The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli (4 reviews, 2.75 and […]

Better than expected

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Others have drawn comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and, being the natural conformist that I am, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you like your female mystery novel narrators on the unreliable side, this may be the book for you. Which is a weird burgeoning trope, if, indeed, three books can be considered a trope. Sometimes, a culture just decides that it’s ready for something. We all consume, basically, the same information. So its not surprising that there would be […]

Left Behind in a Shack to eat Chicken Soup with Kirk Cameron. Jesus.

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There is a pretty good story, here, but it’s lost in the sonorous ramblings of a man too fixated on scenery. Do I need to provide a synopsis? Surely we’ve all seen the movie (not the new one, which I assume is atrocious). In short: it’s a revenge tale, of a first century Jewish man who has his life ruined by a childhood friend, a Roman. Judah Ben Hur spends years as a galley slave, before lucking his way back into wealth and the good […]

The breath of longing

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So much has been written about this book here on CBR, I almost had no choice but to read it. But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I finally got it from Overdrive. It took me days to get into it, and I read multiple books in between the early chapters. But I stuck with it because the premise was very good, and it has received near universal praise (both here, and in the broader literary world). Sticking with a book that […]



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