Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About octothorp

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I buy books faster than I can read them. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: octothorp's Quick Questions interview.)

octothorp's Reviews:

You look like me and I love you

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

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There have been so many “I gave a bot hours of Hallmark movies / Olive Garden commercials / what have you and it generated this content” posts obviously written by people out there that I forgot how much I love actual AI gone amok. Inspiration Bot makes me cackle on the regular. My favorite NewsRadio episode involved Jimmy James’ book “Jimmy James: Corporate Lion Tamer” being translated into Japanese and then back into English, resulting in “Macho Business Donkey Wrestler.” Don’t even get me started […]

Spot on

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon

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I was pleasantly surprised re-reading this book, fully expecting it to go to the resale pile as I remembered very little about it other than that it was a mystery about a dead dog solved by a teenager with autism. I was even less enthusiastic after reading House Rules (see previous review), which very much read like a book by someone who was trying very very hard to understand autism rather than someone who actually did. That’s the difference between the books though, Haddon reaches […]

Suspiciously familiar

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

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I had this nagging sense of deja vu reading this book and couldn’t quite figure out why. I assumed it was that Jodi Picoult has a fairly consistent style, and frankly all of her books kind of remind me of a TV movie version of whatever subject she writes on, but that was only part of it. (So many of her books have a single woman who is romanced by a male character who is clearly just in the book to be her love interest […]

Audience Matters

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

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I have to confess that rating this book is difficult. Obviously the life of a man born into slavery is a compelling and difficult one, so it’s hard to read. But the real reason that this book is difficult to rate is that the author is writing for those with the power to end slavery – he is effectively convincing the reader of his personhood, and that he needs to is depressing, and creates a remove from his experience. Some of this might be attributable […]

Is it any wonder I reject you first?

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

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This book is possibly the most relatable treatise on fame and the corrupting influence of needing approval, a subject near and dear to my heart. It is also a book about a giant alien robot. I love that both of those things are true. April May is a hipster art-school graduate working in web design who stumbles across a giant robot sculpture in New York and, transfixed by its oddness, calls her friend to create a video of it for fun. She interviews “Carl,” the […]

Remember, people, that no matter who you are and what you do to live, thrive and survive, there’re still some things that makes us all the same.

Sin and the Second City by Karen Abbott

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Before my assessment of Karen Abbott’s non fiction account of the Everleigh House, Chicago’s fanciest turn of the century den of iniquity, I have to express my aw-shucks midwestern appreciation for a setting I recognized. It’s not like Chicago isn’t represented in the media or anything, but as the title itself states, not only is Chicago “The Second City” it has to fight for the title with LA. Anyway, there’s something to be said for realizing you’ve walked through an intersection being described, 100 years […]



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