Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When we came to the end, we loved it

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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I picked up this novel because I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, though, as my review states, I was at a loss to explain exactly why I liked it. Ferris’s sense of humor appealed to me, though, and I like authors who don’t claim to have all the answers. Then We Came to the End is his first novel, and it is certainly a curiosity. Written in first-person plural point of view, the narrators’ “we” refers to the employees of an […]

Just when you thought cancer couldn’t suck any more than it already does

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle

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Barbara K. Lipska had already survived two encounters with the dreaded “C” disease when weird things started happening to her brain. In 2009 she fought off breast cancer, undergoing a mastectomy of her left breast, and then, in 2012, she defeated melanoma, or so she thought. That’s the trouble with cancer; you’re never really “cured.” There’s always the chance that it can metastasize somewhere else in your body. For Lipska, a neuroscientist who specializes in studying mental illness, the disease came roaring back in the […]

What stereotype are you most afraid of confirming?

Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude M. Steele

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A group of social psychologists at Princeton University conducted a study in which they asked white male students who were “reasonably athletically inclined” to play ten rounds on a miniature putting course in a laboratory. Some were told nothing about the purpose of the test, while others were told that the test measured natural athletic ability. Those that were told the test measured their athletic ability performed much worse than those who were told nothing about what the test might mean. In the second part […]

So my new favorite author is. . . Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is well-known for being the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, a United States Cultural Ambassador, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom under President Barack Obama. He is also a New York Times bestselling author and, less famously but most pertinently for our purposes, an avid Holmesian. The day he decided to team with Anna Waterhouse to pen a series of novels starring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s less renowned Holmes brother, my world became […]

Should’ve quit while I was ahead

The Uncle Wiggly Book: The Rabbit Gentleman's Adventures by Howard R. Garis

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When I was a kid, we had a board game called the Uncle Wiggily game. It’s a basic “racing track” style game where players draw cards and follow the instructions to try to beat the other players to the end. It’s kind of like Candy Land but with anthropomorphic animals instead of gum drops. The board is illustrated with characters from the Uncle Wiggily story books, and the object is to be the first player to make it from Uncle Wiggily’s bungalow to Dr. Possum’s […]

Five stars of adorable madness

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

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In 2018 I went on a bucket-list trip to Antarctica and saw penguins. Always a fan of the adorable little birds (I mean, come on, that waddle!), I’ve become sort of obsessed. This new-found penguin mania resulted in a Sphenisciformes-themed Christmas, including a hard copy of the delightful 1938 children’s tale, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. I say delightful, but I might have easily said batshit crazy. I want whatever the Atwater couple was smoking when they wrote this. For context, Mr. Atwater died before publishing Mr. […]



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