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:

No, you get off MY lawn

Television Is the New Television by Michael Wolff

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Man did I dislike this book.  Based on the jacket and the title I was expecting a treatise on the nature of content as driven by the state of each method of delivery – TV in the era of even faster communication. I wanted an actual exploration of the one and only thing most of us know about Marshall McLuhan – the medium is the message now that media has changed so much – but instead I got a bunch of inside baseball from someone […]

Under Construction

I Know What I’m Doing by Jen Kirkman

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This is my year to chip away at the stack of unread books and get down to zero before buying new ones, despite my having had this exact same goal the last two CBRs and privately even before that.  So what do I do? Read an entire book at the library to get around that whole “buying new ones” restriction.  I feel like I put myself on a liquid diet to lose weight then started chugging condensed milk. Anyway, I picked this up because apparently […]

Well, I WAS With You

I’m With Fatty by Edward Ugel

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I made it rain at the friends of the library book sale just prior to my annual promise not to buy more books until I read everything in my unread stack (almost always 50 books no matter what I do), and like any good binge it was all impulse. I love personal challenge essays (see above – although I will never ever succeed in diminishing that unread stack, my novels apparently breed in captivity) and for two bucks, how bad could this be? (How many […]

Get more Nell Scovells!

Just the Funny Parts by Nell scovell

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For a book that explores the difficulties of making it as a writer while female in the 1990s, with all the boys club exclusion and outright sexual harassment that implies, this was a surprisingly fun read. The cover of the book says it all; if you watched broadcast tv in the late 1990s to early aughts, odds are you’ve  watched something Scovell wrote.  Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Letterman, NCIS, and one of the better Simpsons episodes in the series’ golden years.  And I had no […]

One wish

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Damn, Liane, why you gotta do my girl Catriona like that? I love that Moriarty doesn’t spare any of her heroes or demonize her villains utterly, but this was as brutal to Catriona as any of Moriarty’s writing is capable.  I won’t lie and say that it didn’t have a lot to do with seeing a lot of myself in Cat, the triplet (with flighty spacey Gemma and no-nonsense Lyn rounding out the trio) whose mundane happiness is made more interesting with a cynical streak, […]

Emphasis on ill

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I didn’t like this book, but I don’t think this is a book that was written to be liked; enjoyment seems like a poor goalpost to measure the book by.  It’s ugly, dark, and unpleasant. So given that this isn’t something that Oprah is going to feature as a new book club selection, how do I judge fairly? It’s compelling and well written; it passed my “still interested after the first couple dozen pages” test, and I read it through completely. The central mystery – […]



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