Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Meg Ryan Rom-Com: I should have bought the Kindle edition (now $1.99!)

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

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Picking out a book is like dating before computers: all you’ve got to go on is cover and genre. Let’s say bleak non-fiction is your wheelhouse. Today you’re not feeling it—hundreds of pages about the Holocaust is enough for one week—so you think, hey! time for something new. Look at this handwritten recommendation on the bookstore shelf. Look at that cute paperclip…aww, it’s a workplace romance. Not my type, but maybe I’ve changed! Maybe there’s still feeling left in my pessimistic soul! I breezed through […]

It’s Not Just You, The World is Collapsing

The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time by Brooke Gladstone

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I idly picked up this slim book—tract? broadside?—at the local bookstore while waiting for my daughter to browse all the new graphic novels. This quick read is probably more potent now than it was upon its original publication in May 2017. The premise: many Americans living in the age of Trump the primary candidate, Trump the Republican nominee, and Trump the President *rightly* feel unmoored from reality. How could we [liberals] so badly misunderstand our fellow Americans? be surprised that our government can be so […]

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

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Orwell is a man of strong convictions. He believes so passionately in the fight against fascism that in 1936 he travels to Barcelona to fight in the revolution. Homage to Catalonia is a detailed account of the politics surrounding the revolution, a fervent defense of the working class and a witness of war from the trenches. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” I will be honest and say that the politics interested me […]

An illuminating book about the grossness of human behavior.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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I went into this expecting the corruption, murder, institutional racism, etc. against the Osage Indians to be very bad, and I still somehow managed to come out of this book mindboggled. This book should be taught in schools, and it is heinous that these terrible things happened, and just as heinous that so many people covered it up, and practically erased it from history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the US were the Osage. By sheer coincidence, after their tribe was […]

The Thrill of Banality

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I read Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four at the start of 2018. I was expecting it to be one thing (a dense, layered murder mystery) and instead got another (a character study and bureaucracy-heavy police procedural). It wasn’t what I would normally read but I appreciated that it was something different. I appreciated the inflections of the main character and how Yokoyama could inject such nuance about life in Japan in the midst of a professional crisis. I had difficulty focusing in the beginning of Seventeen. Yokoyama takes his sweet […]

Horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure

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Sometimes you come across a book that is so mind-blowingly good, you immediately go out and purchase every book ever written by the author. The Road to Jonestown was such a book. A huge, fat book that’s more than worth the effort, it tells you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the Reverend Jim Jones, his followers, just how he got hundreds of otherwise intelligent people to cede control of every aspect of their lives, and the sequence of events that led […]



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