Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sure, we had trouble building Space Station One—but the trouble was people.

Green Hills of Earth by Robert A Heinlein

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CBR12Bingo – Green I think this completes my Bingo board. Or rather, this completes my Bingo Board. A story collection by Robert A Heinlein published in the 1940s. It’s not simply a collection of stories, but hangs together more so like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot or Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as linked stories (thematically at least) about early space exploration, but especially as early space colonization. The stories still mostly hold up and clearly are setting the tone and the scene for a lot of […]

“We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run” (double Bingo)

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

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#CBR12 Bingo: Music   Official book description: In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began.   Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.   He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid […]

Very unlike my own adolescence

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

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#CBR12 Bingo: Nostalgia (set in the 1990s, when I was a teenager) Official book description: Angus: My mixed-breed cat, half domestic tabby, half Scottish wildcat. The size of a small Labrador, only mad.   Thongs: Stupid underwear. What’s the point of them, anyway? They just go up your bum, as far as I can tell.   Full-Frontal Snogging: Kissing with all the trimmings, lip to lip, open mouth, tongues … everything.   Her dad’s got the mentality of a Teletubby (only not so developed). Her cat, […]

Dear Faerie: AITA for Not Inviting My Step-Dad to My Wedding?

A Killing Frost by Seanan McGuire

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  Regular disclaimer for reviews in this series: we are fourteen books in now if you can believe it. Series spoilers can’t really be avoided. So I won’t bother But seriously, fourteen books in already? With a series this long, some drops in quality are to be expected and some instalments will work better than others. I have to admit, while I enjoyed the previous book, The Unkindest Tide, it did feel a little like treading water to me. But happily, for me, A Killing […]

Finally Giving Credit Where It Is Due in the US Cooking Scene

The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin

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CBR Bingo Review #I’ve lost track: UnCannon I was thinking about using N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Element here, but then I figured that was actually somewhat in my wheelhouse as it’s fantasy and queer. Not so much my standard wheelhouse is American History non-fiction. To make it palatable, I found what’s basically history via thing I do like: cookbooks. Scholar and cookbook collector Toni Tipton-Martin is not old (she’s later middle aged, about 60), not white (African American), and not a man. When I was checking […]

“We don’t “all” have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”

Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

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This is a look at our economy and how it came to be from an unusual perspective: that of an anthropologist. In contrast to historians and economists, David Graeber is much more interested in the human aspect and the societal peculiarities that are at the root of our economic system. Before money came into existence, there was already debt because people used complicated credit systems to buy and sell goods, and this division into creditors and debtors never went away again. First, Graeber tackles the […]



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