Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A beat-up book that made me think people need this book

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness. by Kristen Radtke

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If you want to feel really bad about yourself, read Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness. Or, just as likely, if you want to feel great about yourself, read this graphic novel by Kristen Radtke. There are some contradictions, some places you will see yourself and see friends and/or family. It is slow reading, but busy. The book’s theme is, as the title says, about loneliness. Radtke talks about how it has its has ups and downs, in an almost poetic fashion with both […]

Journey to heal

Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely

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Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely is a book I will not tell you about how I felt about it as it had moments that I felt were stronger than others, but others were not as strong as they could have been. But that is just my opinion. Whatever your own experiences are will make this book what it is about. The illustrations are bold, simpler, and colorful. Triggers: suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, school and mass shootings, some Islamophobia, mental […]

“Saul of my pody, put you are wrang there my friend. It is your fat Englishmen that eat up our Scots cattle, puir things.” Got that?

Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott

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cbr17bingo Culture Rather an odd duck, this one.  Some legal jibber-jabber in the frontpiece seems to indicate that this book was not intended to be sold in the US, yet I bought it at the UCLA bookstore.  Hmm.  Anyway. First, let me digress.  I grew up in a small town with a small library, and there really was no other source of books for me other than that, and my Mom’s Book-of-the-Month Club, when she could afford it.  So imagine my thrill, when I started […]

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]

Gilded Age Anastasia

The Gilded Heiress by Joanna Shupe

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Confession: I have never watched the Disney version of Anastasia. It came out when I was very busy doing career things instead of fun things, which I now realize was a mistake. I must not have known that John Cusack was voicing Dimitri the con man love interest, because criminal John Cusack is my favorite of all the John Cusacks (see The Grifters or Grosse Pointe Blank). So the Anastasia connection wasn’t what prompted me to request The Gilded Heiress. I’ve been wanting to pick up Joanna […]

Fun with haiku

A Pond, a Poet, and Three Pests by Caroline Adderson

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I found myself on an online picture book reading frenzy awhile back. I read (or wanted to read, or have read previous) several books by this one publisher, Groundwood Books. One of those books was A Pond, a Poet, and Three Pests by Caroline Adderson and illustrated by Lauren Tamaki. This book is an artistic imagining of how a famous poet wrote one of his most famous haikus. In simple, but far from simple text, there is an actually in depth story about the Japanese […]



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