Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Whose House? Bauhaus!

Bauhaus by Frank Whitford

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: art. This is a book based on the art school and architectural/artistic movement called bauhaus. I don’t always like getting pushed out of my reading comfort zone except when I do. For both CBR17 Bingo AND my local library reading game respectively, I had to read a book on art. And like other subjects where I don’t have much of an interest in, I grab something that’s quick and digestible. This one clocked in under 200 pages and had […]

Come Fly With Me

Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life we Breathe by Carl Zimmer

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Taking a quick step away from genetics and genetic engineering for a moment to write about a slightly different field of biology—aerobiology. A somewhat obscure field of biology that really should not be; if aerobiology had been a more widely recognized and respected field in the 20th and 21st centuries, a major event from five years ago may have played out very differently. I am, of course, talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea that diseases like COVID could spread so easily through the air […]

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

From Diabolical Dart Frogs to Kissing Kiwis and beyond

The Dangerous Alphabet Book  by DK Ryland

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While alternative alphabet books are not new, The Dangerous Alphabet Book  has a clever concept. We start off with the usual A is for something that is nice, normal, familiar. But in the middle of that an Alligator jumps in and hijacks the tale. By wanting to mix things up, make things a little edgy, and make it dangerous, they cause all sorts of mischief and mayhem to ensue. Of course, our first narrator fights this change, until they realize maybe it is a little […]

Real Housewives of Fort Benning

The Wives: A Memoir by Simone Gorrindo

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cbr17bingo Purple Simone is a New Yorker who has just landed her dream job, as an editor.  And now maybe she will have some time to devote to her own writing projects, too.  Her husband, on the other hand, has different plans.  He has joined an elite Army combat unit, and is looking forward to doing his share by shipping out to Afghanistan.  But it’s all good, right, because she can work from home, at whatever Army base home ends up being.  All right, let’s […]

Does this author ever write a bad book?

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel

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Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel This graphic novel is not perfect, but it is darn close. There were just one or two small “bumps” for me. But overall fans will get a huge kick out of this. There is much happening and Bechdel uses their usual wit and observations to get the job done. Even if they cannot get the job of writing their new book or the TV script done. It is life during the years of 2020 to “now” (or around […]



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