Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ok! Ok! I have a dirty mind so this wasn’t what I thought of when they said “Taking a missionary position.”

Dendo: One Year and One Half in Tokyo by Brittany Long Olsen

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No, this book, Dendo: One Year and One Half in Tokyo by Brittany Long Olsen, will not convert you. Yes, Olsen does talk about her church and its beliefs. If you take this as a book that covers almost two years of her life, as a book that just lets you see into a person’s life and take it as that and not as a long LDS pamphlet, then it is fine. If you are a former missionary, if you are a member, if you […]

“When we were growing up, our parents wouldn’t buy us things, so we worked hard and now we can: buy all volumes of manga, buy toys in bulk, buy DVD box sets”

Insufficient Direction by Moyoco Anno

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Insufficient Direction is a humorous autobiographical manga by Moyoco Anno, the wife of Hideaki Anno, who direction Neon Genesis Evangelion. Moyoco is a manga artist and this book chronicles their life together. The main theme is that Hideaki is a huge otaku and Moyoco is trying to remain normal but keeps getting sucked deeper and deeper into an otaku lifestyle. It’s interesting reading this from the 2024 viewpoint of the nerds having taken over the earth and casting my mind back to when being a nerd […]

I’m not any better at meditating now

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

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One of my favorite movies of the past few years is The Holdovers. In it, a curmugeonly history professor played by Paul Giamatti, is stuck at the boarding school he works at over the holiday break with one of his students and the cook. On Christmas day he gives both of them a gift, a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In his words “For my money, it’s like the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita all rolled up into one.” High praise, and […]

Love: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott

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Somehow: Thoughts on Love is a collection of Anne Lamott’s thoughts on love and all its complexities. This was the second book that I have read by this author, but the first that I have listened to on audiobook. She reads the novel herself and I really enjoyed that. Especially with a topic as complex as love, having her narrate the text made me feel like she was there and we were having a discussion. Each chapter takes a look at a different aspect of […]

“That was the entire horror of it. But I didn’t know how to explain that.”

Sea Legs by Jules Bakes and Niki Smith

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This was a random find at the bookstore, which is why I’m such a proponent of wandering around and checking the sections I like once a month or so. You never know! Sea Legs is a middle grade graphic memoir that details Janey’s life on board her parents’ schooner. When the book opens, they’ve spent some time in Florida saving up money so they can start traveling again. Janey has enjoyed being in place long enough to go to school and has made a best […]

“I can’t help wondering whether I was born under a galaxy of lucky stars.”

I Married the World by Elsa Maxwell

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Elsa Maxwell is a curious figure in world history because she was famous for throwing amazing parties and being friends with famous people, but she also shows up in the background of other biographies and memoirs of the period with what can only be described as a dark air of menace — as in Philip Van Rensselaer’s Million Dollar Baby, where Elsa is portrayed as a person who lures rich young women into marriages with con artist playboys and then takes a cut of the […]



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