Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Now did you think it all through? All these things will catch up to you…” (Double bingo)

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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Nowhere Book Bingo: From a genre you’ve never read (true crime) CBR16 Bingo: Fiasco (Theranos was a massive fraud and a fiasco) I’ve owned this book since 2020 and am pretty sure I picked it up in an e-book sale because of the many Cannonball reviews I’ve read about it over the years. Not being particularly interested in the tech world or medical science, and certainly, not someone who reads a lot of business news, I didn’t really hear about this case as it was […]

We Didn’t Start the Fire; She Did, Actually.

Demon Daughter by Lois McMaster Bujold

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So it turned out I’ve been asleep for a bit, because I hadn’t realized that Lois McMaster Bujold had released some more Penric and Desdemona novellas. So some catching up was in order. And a good thing too, because the next review I had previously planned is a bit of a doozy, and it may take me a little while to complete Demon Daughter is the kind of title that made me think that this particular Penric and Desdemona novella was going to be very […]

This book itself is also a fiasco, ironically. CBRBINGO – Fiasco

Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops by James Robert Parish

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I keep forgetting to post this review. I think my brain is trying to block out my having read this book on purpose to protect from either, a) dropping dead of a rage aneurysm, or b) dropping dead from the poisonous word salad the author spews on every page. I would not have read this book or even had it on my radar but Cannonball Read’s BINGO board this year had a ‘FIASCO’ square, and when I found this book I thought it would be […]

“I feel like this isn’t about me”

Yellowface (2023) by R. F. Kuang

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I don’t really know what I can say about this book, which I think means it’s worked? I can say that it’s blistering, and brilliant; I can say that it fits the ‘Fiasco‘ square because it’s about someone who “reached for the stars and utterly failed…a disaster created by human actions” and in this case the disaster is a person who finds herself in a nightmare of her own making, but the disaster is also the publishing industry and the surrounding discourse, and also the […]

Thunder Down Under

Lapse by Sarah Thornton

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Read as part of CBR16Bingo: scandal. The main character is on the run to this small town after a fiasco in her past life and has to deal with a fiasco in her current one.  I grabbed this one maybe because of Ted Lasso? I don’t remember but I feel like I read somewhere that this was pitched as a Ted Lasso-esque coach solving a mystery. That’s not really the case though. Clementine Jones, though she is similarly running from her past, is not the […]

Mystery at Sea

Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks

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The legend of the Mary Celeste, ghost ship of the Atlantic, has sort of always been in my periphery, coming from an ocean-going family. It is at its core a terrible mystery that escaped containment and became a legend that was pulled apart and put back together again from its inception and lasted over a hundred years to the point that its story became almost unrecognizable, even shifting the ship’s name in the retellings.   The Mary Celeste had the sort of history that would lead some […]



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