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:

Channeling Tim Gunn…

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

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… but this felt like student work to me. It’s another book I just didn’t get the hype over, even if I enjoyed quite a lot about it. The blending of the three stories just never gelled for me. I think that the crossover between T.H. White’s experience training a goshawk and MacDonald’s could have sustained a book, and that training a goshawk while mourning one’s father could have, but the three together made the book feel disjointed to me. I kind of wish that […]

I’m gonna have fun with Hillbilly Elegy, aren’t I?

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

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The bumpkin made good story seems to be in something of a renaissance right now, and I think I was spoiled by Educated, which was spectacular and non-fiction.  I enjoyed this book, but the fictional aspect took me out of it – there’s too much to make our protagonist saintly and it feels forced.  I also hate hate hate when writers try to imitate patois in their writing. It feels minstrel-y, and doubles down on the fictional remove because I always think “I have never […]

I Can’t Tell One From Another

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O'Farrell

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Did I buy this book because I’ve read Maggie O’Farrell before and generally liked her work? Sure. Did I REALLY buy this book because it was a buck at Goodwill and quoted the Talking Heads? Yeah, that’s the main reason. I didn’t even judge a book by its cover, I judged it by the title. This is why I have something like 200 unread books in my house. I have a problem. Anyway, this sort of felt a bit like The Vanishing Act of Esme […]

Good news / bad news

The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony snicket

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Downside? You get another Series of Unfortunate Events review, which I am tired of writing because my complaints never change (the reviews are pretty much as repetitive as the books) and I struggle to find new ways of saying “condescending, but pretentiously so” without sounding like I just read a thesaurus (but am pretending is my normal speech pattern) like Handler. Upside? I bough all these books together, and I’m not gonna read any more, so this is the last of my SoUE reviews I’ll […]

I mean, new-new?

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

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UGH DAMMIT. I just bought an interesting looking book from the remainder pile at my local bookstore. The name sounded familiar and I misattributed it to another author’s reputation, but it’s another Daniel Pink book. That’s not to say that this book was miserable, but I didn’t feel like I learned anything from it either. It has that tone that so many management books have (I’m looking in your direction Thomas Friedman) where the author is so in love with their own work that they […]

White whale for a blackout (cbr12bingo 2: white whale)

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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This is a door stopper of a book at 754 pages, but I’ve read longer books quicker. I don’t read enough history, and despite my historian father being obsessed with the civil war in particular, I know the highlights and half-remembered tidbits from AP history.  Team of Rivals has been THE Lincoln book since its publication, so it seemed like a good enough place to start. So I did.  Years ago.  And this whale got beached. I’m glad I finished it, but it is a […]



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