Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Perfect Way to Celebrate the Movie’s 40th Birthday

"What Do You Mean, Murder?” Clue and the Making of a Cult Classic by John Hatch

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My apologies to anyone who wishes they didn’t have to know that this year is the 40th anniversary of the movie Clue. 🙂 One of the Read Harder tasks this year is to read a book about a piece of media you love, and I love Clue. It’s one of my absolute comfort watches, so hunting down this book became a priority.   Author John Hatch also views the movie as one of his favorites, and possibly more of a favorite than he realized before Covid-19 changed the way we […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]

A Potpourri of Gene-Editing Perspectives

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

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Earlier this summer, I started reading and reviewing a number of books related to gene technology with a specific focus on CRISPR. This was not just for my own enjoyment; I’m teaching a class on Gene Technology this winter so I thought I better brush up on everything. And since I’ve been asked to attract as many non-majors as possible, I’ve decided not to focus on just the technical aspects, but also the social and legal aspects as well. This brings us to the next […]

Putting ideas about the past to the test

Dinner with King Tut by Sam Kean

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CBR 17 BINGO: TBR, because whenever Sam Kean comes out with a new book, I add it to my TBR BINGO: Play, Purple, TBR, Diaspora, Culture In the introduction to Dinner with King Tut, Kean confesses that he always found archaeology to be a bit dry. It should be thrilling, discovering the secrets of past civilizations, but he usually finds archaeological sites to be a letdown, with “scores of sunburned men and women sprawled in the dirt, dusting off broken pot shards with toothbrushes.” But […]

90s Pop Culture Drama FTW

Hits, Flops and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick

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Recently, a Gwyneth Paltrow biography was published and people were only too happy to revisit and re-examine the old gossip about the friendship breakdown between Paltrow and our 90s queen Winona Ryder. One of the articles referenced an excerpt from Ed Zwick’s memoir. The excerpt was about his struggle to get Shakespeare in Love made, although it was primarily focused on the behind the scenes drama associated with the original cast, focusing on a young Julia Roberts. It all read as very juicy and 90s, […]



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