Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Jake

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I love reading! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Jake's Quick Questions interview.)

Jake's Reviews:

The Agnostic’s Bible

The Ultimate Evil: The Search For the Sons of Sam by Maury Terry

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I’m a religious person but I don’t begrudge someone their beliefs. Each person has their own journey. Might make me the world’s worst evangelist but whatever, I’ll take it. If God is real, God knows more than I do so I’ll let Them figure it out. I say this because when it comes to conspiracy theories, I tend to parrot a line I’ve heard many an agnostic use over the decades: maybe God is real, maybe not, either way, if God is real, God’s probably […]

That’s Showbusiness?

Complicit by Winnie M Li

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I’m really impressed with how much Winnie M Li was trying to accomplish with this book. For the most part, I think she pulled it off. Because I had it in my head how this was going to go when I read it: unassuming young female on a movie set gets assaulted by a Harvey Weinstein clone. But it’s really more than that. In living up to its title, Winnie M Li shows how the whole system is wretched, including Sarah, nominally the protagonist, who […]

After Days

The Guest by Emma Cline

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I only picked this book up because Quinta Brunson is adapting it. I hope she does. At any rate, I’m glad I did. Until the end, it was very good. I remember liking the story Emma Cline told in The Girls but not the way she did it. It was a compelling tale but painfully overwritten. I didn’t think I’d find myself coming back to her work and, even with its interesting premise, I avoided it last year despite its popularity. But once I started, I […]

Stays the Queen

The Hunter by Tana French

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Tana French is our best living crime writer. Crime fiction, at its best explores the true nature of human beings when at their worst. If there are no atheists in fox holes, there are no angels with guns in their hands. What motivates us to sin? What are the consequences? Why do we commit evil upon our fellow human being? The best writers use their characters rather than their plots to explore this. Tana French doesn’t create characters as much as introduce their fully-lived selves. […]

Empress

Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World by Emma Southon

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Happy Women’s History Month! What better way to observe it than celebrating the most powerful woman in Roman history? I’ve read a lot of books on the Julio-Claudians recently and this is probably the best. Maybe not even “probably.” Emma Southon does a great job explaining how Agrippina’s life was the fabric that wove the narrative of the dynasty together. She was born the year after Augustus’ death and she died during the reign of her son, the last of the family line. She held […]

Behind the Throne

Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

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A few months ago, there was a meme going around asking folks how much they thought about the Roman Empire. Rome has been kind of a curiosity to a whole subset of men this generation. As sea levels rise, fascism marches, and prices gouge, men tend to be more conservative and look to the “old ways.” They conveniently leave out the fact that homosexuality was widely practiced, as well as a fact that their odds of being a slave were substantively higher than being a […]



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