Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A True Crime Memoir

The Babysitter by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan

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Decided to start 2023 off with a bang after listening to an interview of the co-authors on the podcast Tenfold More Wicked. As Liza recounted her childhood story to host Kate Winkler Dawson, my interest was immediately piqued and I borrowed the e-book from the library. Needless to say I burned through this book after 2 nights. The format of the novel is unlike any I have read before, where the author alternates chapter between her childhood growing up in Cape Cod and the story of […]

The Inventor of Leggings? I believe it!

Pat in the City by Patricia Field

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Currently Patricia Field is known as the costuming consultant for the Netflix show Emily in Paris, Emily might be ridiculous but her clothes are divine. Her name may also be familiar from her work on The Devil Wears Prada, Younger, and Ugly Betty. She was the one who put Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu for Sex and the City. But for this little teen girl from the suburbs in the 90s Patricia Field was the name emblazoned across one of the coolest shops in the […]

The Genealogy of Southern Cooking

The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty

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This is a book that showcases my shortcomings as a reviewer. I really enjoyed listening to this book, but am struggling to write about it. It is a memoir, a history of southern cuisine and a book on genealogy. Twitty reads the book himself which works well because the book is a very personal journey. He describes himself as an “obsessive cook with compulsive genealogist tendencies who can point to a map of Africa, Europe, North America, and with it, the South, and guide you […]

One million roses, each handpicked.

In Search of Perfumes: A Lifetime Journey to the Source of Nature's Scents by Dominique Roques

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Dominique Roque, a sourcing agent working in the perfume industry, recounts his travels and travails in pursuit of natural ingredients used in perfumes and dives into the storied history and often precarious methods of the producers of those raw materials. Perfume is a ubiquitous thing, to the point that you don’t really even register it. I have several bottles sitting on my dresser right now. But I’d never really thought about where the components of which they are composed of, which was why I found In […]

“Not to be devastated by my mistake, but instead to be motivated. He spoke to me with the quality one often encounters in truly wise people—forgiveness.”

Spare by Prince Harry

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I had no intention of reading Prince Harry’s memoir. Until I did. I should have known I’d cave, I’m a sucker for memoirs. There’s something about hearing a person’s story in their own words, particularly if that story is contested in some way, as Prince Harry’s has always been. What Spare is, at its core, is a person reckoning with the way in which they were raised, and the very real ways grief and trauma informed their experience of the world. That is the piece […]

Madeline’s Working-Class Older Brother

Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans

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Ludwig Bemelmans recalls his time as a waiter at a fabulous hotel in New York City, complete with lots of humor, tragedy, and a cast of colorful coworkers. I picked up this book because I love behind-the-scenes stories, and because I was interested in learning about the fabulous excess of 1920s New York City from a working-class perspective. It was only after I started reading it that I realized that the Bemelmans also wrote the Madeline series, about the little girls who lived “In an […]



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