Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fitting category (CBR12Bingo 2: Repeat – Money)

The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket

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You guys, even I’m getting tired of my Series of Unfortunate Events reviews. I don’t think there’s too much left to say about the books as they are very much all of a kind, and unlike the wonderful, authorless Harry Potter books, they don’t increase in complexity or thematic depth with their readers. It’s the same damn book over again: Baudelaire orphans meet their new home and a new variety of inept adult, find Count Olaf behind a disguise along with one or more of […]

What do you tell your children? (CBR12Bingo: Uncannon)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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There’s a line from Lindy West’s Shrill that really resonated with me, in her case about her disillusionment with comedy, “Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.”  There’s truth to that for pretty much any intersectional thinking, and Between the World and Me is basically Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking directly to his teenage son about his long slow realization that the same is true of anti-racism.  His long, slow realization is that the Dream (capitalization his) of white […]

Sell crazy somewhere else, we’re all stocked up here. (CBR12Bingo: Happy)

Resisting Happiness by Matthew Kelly

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I was at Goodwill buying a few books that seemed like a good enough deal for a dollar (including the just-reviewed Flame Alphabet, which … no. The cover was pretty though!) and at the last second I threw this one on the pile. My love of behavioral economics is well known, it was a fairly slim volume, and I particularly love learning the reasons why people often behave irrationally. Sure, let’s figure out why people resist happiness! …They turn away from God. *Flips book over, […]

Didn’t land the dismount (CBR12Bingo 2: Pandemic)

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

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No one remakes bad movies. We get a hundred Jurassic World movies like the first one wasn’t flipping perfect, but the movies with promising premises that fail in the execution remain in the dustbin of history. I want someone to remake this book. The premise is strong and intriguing – there’s a virus of some kind that renders speech impossible to listen to. At first it’s just the voices of children that become toxic to adults, but it progresses and soon any speech renders the […]

I’m waiting for it; that green light, I want it (CBR12Bingo2: The Roaring Twenties)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I don’t think that there is a single take on The Great Gatsby that hasn’t been done, overdone, flipped and reversed. But there’s a reason that so many people have written about this damn book – it’s a marvel of precision. There are no words wasted. This is particularly awe inspiring for me, who has never met a five word sentence I couldn’t torture into twenty. In my desperate attempt to say something fresh about a book I’ve read a hundred and eleventy twelve times, I […]

No One Sings Like You Anymore

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm

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Two things relating to the music I liked back then happenend in 1994 that left a deep impression on teenage me. In April, Kurt Cobain died, and I was absolutely shocked and remained glued to MTV for days. Like so many others, I had become a grunge fan when I discovered Nevermind, and I could not quite grasp that he had shot himself. A few weeks later I bought Soundgarden’s Superunknown which just blew my mind with the insane guitar tunings they used, the incredible […]



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