Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sweet and and a Little Salty

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

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Best for: Fans of gentle storytelling and humor. In a nutshell: Comedian and writer Gondelman tells stories from his life, usually with a humorous take, and often with a bit more self-awareness than one gets from such books. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: I’m most familiar with Gondelman as a panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and I follow him on BlueSky, but didn’t realize he had a book, so figured I would check it out. Review: This is […]

“Reading…is fun to do and it lets you feel superior to other people.”

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

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Josh Gondelman has been one of my favorite comedians for a while now. I often fall asleep to comedy albums and specials. His second album, Physical Whisper, is frequently in the bedtime rotation and his more recent album, Dancing on a Weeknight, also makes its way in from time to time. He is one of my favorite Twitter people (@joshgondelman). I was so excited when my library hold on his memoir, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results, finally became available. Gondelman begins […]

Non Fiction End of Year Round- Up

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo- and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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I think it is safe to say I completely fell off the CBR wagon but as the year draws to a close, and my office currently has a total of five people in, I wanted to try and get caught up on reviews. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable task until I wrote out every book title I still needed to review and realized I was nineteen books behind while still actively reading two other books. So in lieu of complete, well thought out reviews […]

Memoirs and Essays

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live by Chris Kattan

So, Anyway... by John Cleese

Burn the Place: A Memoir by Iliana Regan

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters

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I apparently started this draft on 11/21 — time to catch up! (4 stars) Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman I can’t figure out where I heard about this book — I thought it was on CBR but I can’t find any reviews. Anyway, I’d never heard of Josh Gondelman before picking up this book, but he turns out he’s damn funny. He used to write for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and also created the SeinfeldToday Twitter […]



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