Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Censorship sucks!

Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

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I saw a TikTok where the author of a book had stitched a meeting of a local school board. They were proposing to ban the book because of foul language and depictions of drug abuse. This is a YA autobiographical graphic novel of the author’s life through the end of high school. The author is also the illustrator. It starts with depictions of him as a child having nightmares; seeing his mother with several men; and, spending his night on the floor outside her room. […]

If the “them apples” guy wrote a book, this would be it.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

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What do Usher and St. Augustine have in common? I enjoyed their Confessions more than Thomas De Quincey’s. (Also, both Usher and Augustine were both great dancers in their prime.) There have probably been books that were more disappointing to me that Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but I can’t think of any right now. Mr. De Quincey’s Confessions first made itself known to me through Nick Tosches’ The Last Opium Den. That book was less about opium and more about the search for something […]

She’ll Take Manhattan

Dope by Sara Gran

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Dope is such a solid crime novel that it makes me want to immediately clear my TBR pile and read Sara Gran’s entire catalogue. The problem with that is I’ve tried to read Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead so many times and have never been able to get into it. I just can’t connect with the inner monologue of the titular character. Which sucks because it’s doubtless that Sara Gran is a talented writer. I picked this one up when I saw it on a […]

Think Someone Could Record the Songs from this Novel?

Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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Bingo Square: Pajiba The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was one of my favorite reads this year (review forthcoming, eventually, hopefully), so I was excited to realize Reid had a new novel out.  When I started actually going through the Bingo board and looking through the Pajiba archive, I was even more excited to realize that I could read it for that square – I was actually trying to find Dustin’s article on Baby Teeth because I thought I might finally use this as the […]

This book was not for me. Maaaybe it would be for you?

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Not quite sure what to say about this book, because not quite sure what to think about it. This book was written after a Buzzfeed article detailing Nico Walker’s life (soldier in Iraq, has PTSD, comes home gets hooked on heroin, starts robbing banks to fuel heroin habit, goes to jail) piqued the interest of a book editor, who began pursuing him to write a book. So this is basically a fictionalized version of Walker’s own story. Which is one of the problems I have with it. […]

“How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought . . .” #CBRBingo

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“Everything was under control. No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. […]



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