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:

There’s always been a rainbow hangin over your head (CBR12Bingo: Violet – Blackout)

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

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I have to be honest, I never got the cult of Marilyn, even with an aunt whose sloe eyes and platinum hair invited a comparison she doubled down on by naming my cousin after Monroe. I’ve seen quite a few of her performances, and wasn’t unimpressed – you have to be pretty clever to play dumb convincingly, and even in her low-watt-bulb roles Marilyn never seemed dumb, just sort of airily unconcerned with whether she seemed smart or not. I’ve seen Niagara, I’ve seen Some […]

There is grandeur in this view of life (CBR12Bingo: Green – Double bingo)

Human Errors by Nathan Lents

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Success gets all the headlines, but I’m far more interested in failures. Success can be attributable to luck, or timing, or actual skill, or some combination of small factors that ultimately propel a project to a good outcome. Failure? More often than not, you know why something failed, and that makes the next attempt better. Failure is a sign of reach exceeding grasp, as it should be. I don’t care why something works, I want to know why it doesn’t. The human body is no […]

Hyperopic people can’t see well either…. (CBR12Bingo: Yellow – Double Bingo)

Farsighted by Steven Johnson

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First off, credit where credit is due: Steven Johnson is a renaissance man. I thought the name looked familiar, and realized that he’s the author of The Ghost Map – the amazing book about contact tracing leading to the discovery of the nature of Cholera –  which I thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn’t have thought was by the same author given the difference in subject matter. He’s also the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, which I haven’t read but definitely seems a bit closer […]

An Orange Cover by a Green (CBR12Bingo: Orange – Double Bingo)

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

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I really liked this book and wasn’t expecting to. It was a dollar and I can’t resist a bargain, but I was pretty underwhelmed by The Fault in Our Stars – didn’t hate it but didn’t understand why it was a blockbuster. It’s kind of a recurring problem with teen romances – teenage romances don’t last (well, typically. I met my husband at 18. We were children. Our being together makes little to no sense) – so you know they’re not gonna live happier ever […]

Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto, for helping me escape just when I needed to. (CBR12Bingo: Repeat – friendship)

Ungifted by Gordon Korman

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Everyone told me that I was going to love college, and that I’d just have to grin and bear it through high school. College was okay, I actually didn’t hate high school (despite being a Daria Morgendorffer type, I quickly fell in with the artsy nerdy kids and our school was diverse enough that the teen movie style cliques didn’t really apply, everyone more or less got along with everyone else give or take), but there is no amount of money you could pay me […]

My Mathematical Mind (CBR Bingo: Red – Double bingo)

Fluke by Joseph Mazur

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I really liked this book, even if it felt a bit like homework. (I guess I shouldn’t have been that shocked given that it’s a math book about coincidence, rather than a coincidence book with math.)  It’s the sort of book I wish I had been assigned in school; I never liked math in the abstract and could only retain it when it had a relationship to the real world. I hated algebra until I took chemistry and could use it to balance equations. This […]



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