Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Pike, This Ain’t Wuthering Heights

The Shocking Experiments of Miss Mary Bennet by Melinda Taub

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Mary Bennet is famously the odd one out among her bright, vivacious sisters – an awkward show-off and a bore. But in this book, it’s what Mary’s doing off the page that deserves attention. This book is part-sequel, part-companion to the fabulous The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, which I read and greatly enjoyed last year. You haven’t got to read that book to enjoy this one – Mary and Lydia are after all not exactly close – but there’s definitely some things which […]

Now is a good time to become familiar with social determinants of health

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

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What a time to be alive and listening to John Green narrate his book, Everything is Tuberculosis. I’ve been listening to it slowly because I am always on the verge of a rage stroke and I want to outlive the current administration. I listened to the last chapter and post script hours after reading that the Department of Education has decided that nursing is no longer a profession. I’m lucky to be alive. Sophia’s review of Everything is Tuberculosis is probably better balanced, because I […]

The unofficial Best and Worst List 2025 (so far!)

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I know I put in the official Best and Worst List but honestly out of almost 600 reviews (and several I haven’t posted yet) I’m going to have more than three best and one worst. Therefore, I am going to honor y’all with my list of only the ones I have posted a review for here that could have been used. The bold are the ones I used in the official count, italics almost used and the rest were on the list. WORST DAYGLOAYHOLE #1 […]

A Wonderful Winter’s Tale

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

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Foxes are foxes, to be sure, but they can also present themselves as humans.  They tend to be beautiful or handsome, and humans in their presence can become somewhat confused about what just happened.  Some are tricksters by nature, while others are quite serious.  And many just enjoy living among humans. Snow is not one of the later.  She is out for revenge.  She had left her child, curled up in a barrow in the snow while she went hunting, and while she was gone, […]

Was vast social inequality and control inevitable? A dense, meticulously researched final work from anarchist anthropologist David Graeber says “no.”

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, David Wengrow

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I’ve been putting off reading this 704-page book for a few years, believing it deserved time and attention I didn’t have. David Graeber, who died suddenly in 2020, was an anthropologist and activist, an anarchist philosopher who, through confronting social inequality in unrelenting, novel, and thoroughly-source and -reasoned manner carved his way into a central role in the field. I’ve always found Graeber to be able to reorient entire areas of society so they made sense—and nonsense—in novel ways. Debt: The First 5000 Years and […]

The boy who needed to be God

Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown by Candace Fleming

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Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown by Candace Fleming can sometimes be a bit slow in the pacing, sometimes a smidgen romantically written, sometimes sad, sometimes scary, sometimes heart pounding, but always interesting. For me, the “small details” (such as it wasn’t Kool-Aid, the ingreediants used for the mixture were less than $9 then, Jones’ “rainbow family,”) were in some ways more interesting than the overall picture and that was fascinating.  The “human” side of things (even with Jones […]



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