Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A surprisingly earnest (and not surprisingly literal) exploration of the Bible.

The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

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Feels good to finally knock this off my TBR after 13 years, and it was a pretty good read, but I think I wanted more from it. This mindset is puzzling, because I was actually expecting less than what I got here. I was expecting this to be more of a satirical, humorous, critical exploration of the Bible. And it was not that! At all! Jacobs is extremely, beyond-call sincere in his exploration. He’s funny, but the humor is secondary. His quest comes first. (He […]

Be my friend, Rachel Bloom! Please!

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

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Rachel Bloom is a comedic force. In her memoir I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, Bloom walks us through her life from childhood all the way through the birth of her first child. Bloom holds nothing back. I mean nothing. There are stories about learning how to poop in a toilet, learning about and enjoying masturbation, how she was bullied as a child, what living with obsessive-compulsive disorder was like, and more! Bloom frequently dips in and out of presenting her life factually […]

“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

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Last year, I fell off the CBR wagon when COVID shut down all of our libraries and I was unaccustomed to actually buying books. Then I may have forgotten to return the books I already had out and accrued a fine. So I started 2021 determined to complete a 52 book Cannonball but obliged to pay for books until I settled my library account. Without the luxury of picking ten books and being free to abandon anything that didn’t work out in the first chapter, […]

A small book about big ideas.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

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I now see why this has been a bestseller. I mean, I loved his first book, so I figured I would like this one, too, but his first book was a straight up history, and this one was much more of a genre mish-mash. I didn’t at all realize going in that a large portion of it would be memoir, and that turned out to be the best part of the book! I finished this book on January 6th. It is ruining my reviews, so […]

Willingly In the Valley Still Means You’re Underground

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

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This book is the Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead for the Silicon Valley non-tech set. Which is to say, it is peak all the feminisms that we have tried to be better about since Ms. Sandberg’s book, aka White Feminism x High Paying Job Feminism x One of the Boys Feminism etc etc. That being said…I am, in my default, unexamined state, very much a White, High Paying Job, One of the Boys feminist. It takes constant work for me to plant intersectionality […]

Underwhelmed

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman

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I’ve heard positive things about the Netlix miniseries Unorthodox, so I was excited when Deborah Feldman’s memoir was proposed as a possible subject for my “Pandemic Book Club.” Sadly, the promising topic of a woman cutting ties with her Hasidic upbringing didn’t live up to my expectations, largely due to the blandness of the author’s writing, partially due to my absolute lack of shock at anything the book reveals. Feldman’s memoir describes her childhood, in which she’s brought up in a strict Satmar Hasidic household in […]



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