Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

For the OG Sex and the City fans, if Samantha was the writer

Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King

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Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer is a sweet, sex-positive collection of essays by Rax King. The author frames each essay as “about” a particular pop cultural artifact — Hot Topic, America’s Next Top Model, the Cheesecake Factory — and uses that as a jumping-off point for personal memoir. First, the good: she’s a very skilled writer, and even the chapters that are about cultural moments that I didn’t personally experience (e.g. Degrassi) are well-handled enough that I was able […]

An entertaining and eye opening tour through Dave Grohl’s extraordinary life (so far)

The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

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The new pseudo-autobiography, The Storyteller, from Foo Fighters frontman/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl is not conventional. This makes sense since neither is its author. Rather than telling his life story in chronological order, the book is structured as a series of anecdotes that hit significant events mostly in the order they occurred. Whenever I am reading a biography I always dread the beginning chapters as the author goes into detail about their parents, family, and childhood. I tend to skim these parts because, for the most […]

Aussie Comedian Memoir Double Feature

Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby

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I just finished reading two memoirs by Australian comedians concurrently: Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Ten Steps to Nanette’ and ‘Challenge Accepted’ by Celeste Barber. The parallels and differences between each were, in a word, fascinating, so that is why I am reviewing both together. Gadsby’s tone throughout was dire. She recounted the damage and traumas she’s endured over a lifetime – from her sexuality, her neural diversity, her physical appearance, and her family relationships… she has been through the ringer. She is diagnosed as autistic, has been […]

Catharsis

The Castleton Massacre: Survivors’ Stories of the Killins Femicide by Sharon Anne Cook and Margaret Carson

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In 1963, a former minister, long separated from his wife, went on a rampage and murdered four people, two of whom were pregnant. Now one of the survivors of the massacre and her cousin have put together the story of what happened. I have never heard of this case before, but picked up this book because of the identities of the authors – one is the niece of the murderer, and one the daughter of one of the victims, but they were raised together and […]

A Family History

Seven Aunts by Staci Lola Drouillard

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Author Drouillard tells the history of her family in recent generations through the lives of her seven aunts, four on her mother’s side and three on her father’s. I’ve always been interested in family histories, because no two are the same – that, and that there are generally a lot of secrets to uncover and I am a nosy sort of person. The fact that Seven Aunts is so wholeheartedly focused on the lives of the women in the family, tracing their parallels and divergences, made it […]

‘She’s very good at stalling. Masterfully manipulative’

My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress (2022) by Rachel DeLoache Williams

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Note: Contains spoilers for Inventing Anna (2022) and My Friend Anna (2019, 2022) If you’ve watched Inventing Anna (2022) on Netflix, you know who Rachel is–the young woman who starts off optimistic and well-meaning, excited about her new friendship with Anna Delvey (and the luxe life that comes with her), and ends up anxious, then frantic, then an embittered nervous wreck, on the verge of losing her job at Vanity Fair. As opposed to the steely and poised Anna, whose tears and passion are carefully […]



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