Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About KimMiE"

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I love reading nonfiction books, especially ones about nature, zoology, brain chemistry, and psychology. I also love the classics, especially Victorian lit, but I'm pretty open to new genres. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: KimMiE”'s Quick Questions interview.)

KimMiE"'s Reviews:

This memoir legitimately deserves 5 stars, but I’m too angry to give it a rating yet

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

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CBR 17 BINGO: “G” (for Glass) Back in 2019, I recommended Educated to my sister. After she read and enjoyed (not sure that’s the right word) it , she asked me whether I’d ever read The Glass Castle. “In some ways, it’s worse,” she told me. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle, and I understand now where she was coming from. While Tara Westover’s parents were consistently ignorant and controlling, the parents of Jeanette Walls were people of dichotomy. Her father was […]

All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

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CBR 17 BINGO: Border, because the murder takes place just after the train passes over the Yugo-Slavian border, resulting in there being no local police onboard. Also, the collection of guests on the train cross many borders into many different nationalities. Last year I received a beautiful Folio Society edition of Murder on the Orient Express for Christmas and have been waiting for just the right time to re-read this mystery. When I planned a train trip across the Canadian Rockies, I knew the time […]

You could write the formula for all the future

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

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CBR 17 BINGO: Play (because you know, theater) My freshman year literature professor told me that you should always read a Shakespeare play through twice to really get to the heart of it. I think that’s a good rule of thumb for any worthwhile literature, and I often think about doing so, except there are too many books in the world to read and right now I’m under time constraints with CBR BINGO. But if I were going to follow her amended advice, Arcadia would […]

An appalling, vital read

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

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CBR 17 BINGO: Citizen. While Mennonite women theoretically have the same citizenship rights as anyone else in their country, this isn’t the reality for the women of Molotschna. Women Talking, adapted for film in 2022, is a fictionalized response to very real and appalling incidents that occurred in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. During that period, more than 100 women in a remote Mennonite colony woke up to signs that they had been raped during the night. Their claims were dismissed by the colony elders: […]

If you like your coffee with extra saccharine

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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CBR 17 BINGO: Work, because the stories take place in the coffee shop where Kei, Nagare, and Kazu all work Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a collection of four short stories loosely combined into a novel. The characters overlap from story to story, and some incidents in earlier stories come into play later in the book, but for the most part, each chapter stands alone. The Funiculi Funicular, run by husband and wife team Nagare and Kei, appears to be an ordinary cafe, but […]

Creating a language is no joke. Or, maybe it is, because I laughed a lot reading this book.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

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CBR 17 BINGO: Diaspora. The author uses the Jewish diaspora to illustrate the remarkable resurgence of Hebrew as a spoken language. You could also argue that Esperanto speakers form a diaspora. When you think of “invented” languages, you might immediately think of Esperanto, the late-19th century experiment in creating a universal language to bring people closer together. Or you might think about Star Trek geeks going all-in on their hobby by learning Klingon. Or you might ponder J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish languages, created decades before he […]



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