Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

New crafts for a pandemic #How-To

Sewing for Dummies by Jan Saunders Maresh

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Bingo Square: How-To I decided this pandemic period that I would take up sewing! I love crafts and hate trying on clothes in stores. Also, I’d been gifted a sewing machine by my very sweet mother-in-law a few Christmases ago, and now I finally had some extra money to be able to buy fabric and get to sewing! Spoiler alert: it’s super fun and I have spent way too much money on cute fabric. Not knowing where to start (and not interested in taking classes, […]

For the Planetary Good – A Survival Guide

Turning the Tide on Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again by Lucy Siegle

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers approximately 1,6 million square kilometres, plastic has been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on Earth, and by 2050 there could be more pieces of plastic in the ocean than fish. These are the facts Lucy Siegle tells us in the first part of this book, along with the backstory of the plastic dilemma, the truth about recycling, and the way plastic is pushed on us by retailers and manufacturers. In the second […]

Yes! This is What I Was Looking For

How to Machine Sew: Techniques and Projects for the Complete Beginner by Susie Johns

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BINGO: Orange Best for: People who have never used a sewing machine. In a nutshell: Author Johns provide an extremely basic overview of how to use a sewing machine, and then follows it up with projects to practice on. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: After the last book, I did a bit more research before clicking purchase. This one looked to actually explain how to use a sewing machine. Review: It’s exciting when a book meets one’s needs and desires exactly, and this […]

Not academic, but that’s also not really the point

The Atlas of Happiness: The Global Secrets of How to Be Happy by Helen Russell

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If you happened to read the Little Book of Hygge that was everywhere a few years ago, this is a similarly styled (and similarly lightweight) ‘how to be happy’ guide- down to the similar pictures and easy-read formatting. Russell, who is a British journalist now living in Denmark, takes ideas and ideals of happiness from a variety of cultures, describes them over a short chapter, and then gives a ‘how to’ list at the end that gives ideas for incorporating.  While I appreciated the sentiment […]

Everyone should read this book, but the people who need it most won’t. (CBR12Bingo: How To)

A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel Levitin

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I feel like this book should be required reading with any college degree. I even loaned it to my colleague’s economics professor husband (shoutout to Econ Dave for having provided me with so many behavioral economics books, had to return the favor – but I want this one back!) in hopes it might make his college curriculum. It’s basically a how-to manual at spotting misinformation, but it never feels like anything but a fun read; it’s accessible enough to read for fun but serious enough […]



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