Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Nutshell I Needed

The Mini Rough Guide to Athens by Various

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Best for: People looking for some very basic info to kick-start their holiday planning. In a nutshell: Small basic book with information on Athens and surrounding areas. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: I’m going to Greece later this year. Review: I’m lucky enough to be able to take a trip later this year, to a country I’ve never been to before. Most of what I know about Greece is from US pop culture, with a sprinkling of knowledge based on what I learned […]

The Ultimate Backstage Pass

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway by William Goldman

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William Goldman is a writer I greatly enjoy no matter the format. His novels, like Marathon Man and The Princess Bride, are sharp and funny, and his non-fiction books about his experiences in Hollywood are perceptive and appealingly acid-tongued. I’ve been circling The Season, Goldman’s look at the inner workings of Broadway, for a long time. Goldman spent the 1967-68 theater season following every new play that opened on Broadway, and even a few that didn’t. He wanted to know how the industry worked, and […]

Calvin and Hobbes or Jackson and Irwin adventures?

Jackson's Wilder Adventures V02 Dentistry and Dreams, by Sarah Davidson

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I found a series awhile back that I thought was one of the best I had read. It was Jackson’s Wilder Adventures by Sarah Davidson. It was clever and unique. A young boy, Jackson, and his Calvin and Hobbesesque Hobbes, called Irwin the Thylacine, were the perfect narrators. Davidson mixed time travel in a Dr. Who manner with fun educational facts. Granted, there is no actual Tardis (and/or fill in your favorite doctor), just an old cardboard box, but the adventures were as fun. We […]

Judgy-wudgy was a bear…

No Judgement by Lauren Oyler

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Is it possible to read one-too-many feminist millennial essay collections? If so, I think I’ve reached that point. Through this collection of essays, I learned a bit about Oyler. I learned about her chequered dating history, her life as an expat in Berlin, her experimentation with drugs, her meandering views on autofiction, and her thoughts on how people ‘gamify’ Goodreads reviews. There were elements I liked. I appreciated the critique of criticism itself, the pretentious life-abroad anecdotes, and her takedown of TEDx-style vulnerability culture. She’s […]

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The Devil's Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by Randall Sullivan

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This book is described as a cultural, historical and religious study of evil and the Devil; how various civilizations throughout History have viewed the concept of an “ultimate evil”, and references several major literary, religious and historical figures, from the Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleister Crowley, and many more, among them Charles Baudelaire, whose story “The Generous Gambler” is where Sullivan got the title. With a side trip into the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980’s, Mexican […]

Over 700 words and I didn’t say what I wanted to

Silence, Full Stop: A Memoir by Karina Shor

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WARNING: several trigger moments. When you get about a third of the way into a book and you know if you like it or not is an odd sensation. But a helpful one. Afterall, if you really really do not like it, you can stop and nothing is really lost. And if you like it, you can continue and nothing is lost but mostly it’s all gain. But what about that book (it might be rare) but you don’t like anything but you don’t hate […]



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