Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Moving Distractions. Or, When Ronnie got Salty

Fair Game: The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology in Australia by Steve Cannane

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I’ve been moving around a lot in the last few years, and I’ve developed some little rituals over the process. My last move was only a month ago, and  like so many of my moves, it involved extended amounts of time dicking around with Ikea furniture and getting rather frustrated. I have an audiobook especially for that task. It must have been eight or nine years ago now, but I had spend the best part of an afternoon trying to put a damned bed together […]

Looking to Raise Your Blood Pressure? Here Ya Go.

Escape by Carolyn Jessop

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cbr16 bingo cults This book went on my To-Read list decades ago, when the Warren Jeffs scandal was still new.  For me, I couldn’t understand why a woman would put up with this.  This on-the-ground account is revelatory and explains the dynamics that are still at work today. Carolyn Jessop was a sixth generation Mormon, and not your mainstream Mormon, but a member of FLDS, a fundamentalist cult (since it has been disavowed by the mainstream church, I’m gonna call it what it is.)  At […]

Life on a Cult TV Show – While Also in an Actual Cult!

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz

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CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son. Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time. I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show […]

Everything is 100% off if you don’t buy it.

Don't Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy: A Minimalism Book by Tara McKenna

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Buy for your real life: Remember those high-heeled boots I bought that were perfect for life in New York City? I didn’t buy those for my real life, unfortunately. Figure out what you tend to buy for your fantasy life, and face the reality that perhaps those things aren’t for you. ― Tara McKenna, Don’t Be Trashy: A Practical Guide to Living with Less Waste and More Joy CBR16 Bingo: Cult I have anxiety. Every time I unwrap something packaged in plastic, or when I […]

The food she ate, the wine she drunk, and the sexy times in between

An Age of License: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley

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If I had An Age of License: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley before her others, I don’t think I would have liked her writing as much as I do. Usually her work has a humorous edge to things, even when it is the serious story of dating, getting married or having a baby. Her semi-autobiographical books (the younger readers) also are lighter and great in color and details but are not overwhelming. With her travelogue graphic novel we are given a journal/diary of a few […]

None: pau

Pau: The Last Song of the Kaua’i ‘o’o by Tony Piedra

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I find it funny (not ha ha, but interesting funny) when I look at a book and think that I don’t really want to read it, but then for some reason, it comes back up on the ol’ radar and then it looks like reading material (well, it always looked like reading material, but material I now want to read). Recently, when I was looking at new online readers, I found Pau: The Last Song of the Kaua’i ‘o’o, and this was the case. It […]



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