Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Delightful, entertaining, and informative

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

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CBR17Bingo: Migrant (because Australia is a country of migrants–beginning with the Aboriginals and their mysterious journey by ship thousands of years ago, to the first European migrants, to the current migrants [almost half of the population of Sydney was born overseas]). My husband and I began a tradition at our first anniversary of finding a book that relates to something we did during the year, and then we both read it. We haven’t been married very long, but we generally choose books about somewhere we […]

It’s not a walk in the woods

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

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I’ve already read A Walk in the Woods and The Body by Bill Bryson, and I found them both entertaining and informative. So, when I went looking for another audiobook for my commute, I decided to give At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) by Bryson a shot. Bill Bryson lives in an old parsonage in a rural part of England, and he uses this home as a framework to work through a lot of history that made his home a home. Although he goes into a number of […]

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

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When I was looking at the 2022 Read Harder Challenge for the first time and saw #9: “Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest”, I knew without looking what that book would be, even though I haven’t looked at the beginning of my list in years. And that’s because I’ve been avoiding this book for as long as I’ve wanted to read it. Just one word for you: supervolcano. In Bryson’s signature breezy, humorous, yet intelligent style, he will explain to you […]

Blueberry Muffin Brains and lots of other stuff

The Body A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

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I started The Body A Guide for Occupants about a year ago; I had kind of a pattern starting the year off with a science book of some sort. This year, I guess I’m also ending with one. This book is on the one hand pretty readable since the science is explained in some detail without getting too technical; my last biology class was well over a decade ago. On the other hand, it’s also incredibly dense, making it sort of hard to read for […]

Calling All Word Nerds

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got that Way by Bill Bryson

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cbr category Question If you can draw one conclusion from this book, it could be that the English language, possibly more than any other, delights in being silly.  There is simply no other excuse for so many British town names, such as Great Snoring and Farleigh Wallop.  American English is no slouch in this department although one suspects its choice are more deliberate, such as Peeled Chestnut, Tennessee; What Cheer, Iowa; and Maggie’s Nipples, Wyoming. But the richness of the many various forms of English […]

Shakespeare: The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

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Cbr14Bingo – Font — While there’s a lot of talk of printing, printing errors, and handwriting in this book, I am mostly looking at this as a sober look at the facts we know about the life of Shakespeare with the dry wit and editorial selection prowess of Bill Bryson. This book looks at the history of Shakespeare, as a person, and tries to sort out the facts. What this means is that Bryson looks squarely at what we know for sure based on specific […]



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