Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Cheese don’t stink

Lisa Cheese and Ghost Guitar (Book 1): Attack of the Snack by Kevin Alvir

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Lisa Cheese and Ghost Guitar (Book 1): Attack of the Snack by Kevin Alvir is a lot of things. I was about half way through when I realized it probably was mostly a commentary on capitalism, mom & pop stores vs. the big man and the greed of “bigger and better” and addiction to that (via fast food joints).  It is a story of love and friendship and demon possession. If a humanoid-unicorn had a superhero origin story this would be it. There was more […]

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

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I wished someone would invent an online calculator – the user would enter the name of an artist, whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict. A calculator is laughable, unthinkable. Yet our moral sense must be made to come into balance with our art-love. I wanted there to be a universal balance, a universal answer. ― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma CBR16Bingo: Bananas We are living in an age where […]

Different tune, same story

Battle of the Bands by Eric Smith and Lauren Gibaldi

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There’s a thing that happens when you totally crush out on someone. It’s like you can feel your heartbeat in every part of your body. There’s a euphoric kind of excitement mixed with sadness and terror. It’s hard to explain, but it happens in an instant and then just explodes and grows from there, consuming your every waking thought and sometimes your dreams. You can’t escape from it. It takes over and runs the controls that make you . . . you. Suddenly, you aren’t […]

How could anyone know he’d be Leonard Bernstein?

Music was IT: Young Leonard Bernstein by Susan Goldman Rubin

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It took me a few days to get through Music was IT: Young Leonard Bernstein not because it was a hard read but was a read that took time to get through as there was a lot going on and I needed to concentrate on it. Plus, having a cold that made me not want to read did not help. Susan Goldman Rubin created a good introduction about the man Leonard Bernstein, but it needed more as it ends on his debut in Carnegie Hall […]

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 […]

NOT one of the Top 10 romances of the year. Not even Christina Lauren’s best romance this year.

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Holland Bakker is trying to be a writer, but two years after graduating from college, still doesn’t really feel like she has anything to write about. The apartment she lives in is in part paid for by her wealthy uncles, and even her job, as a stagehand/photographer at the Broadway theatre where her uncle is the musical director is thanks to him. She’s feeling adrift and like a bit of a scrounger, and desperately wishes she could find some purpose. For more than six months, […]



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