Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The celery plant will eventually tire, as we all do.

The Everlasting Meal Cookbook by Tamar Adler

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The good news is, I don’t have to write a cookbook. The other good news is that you can buy Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Leftovers A to Z and have a better cookbook than I would write. It isn’t a coffee table book filled with artfully photographed food. It is an enormously useful cookbook that suggests uses for almost everything sitting in your fridge or pantry. As much as I love cookbooks and spend hours reading recipes, I rarely actually cook from recipes. […]

“I didn’t smuggle the dog into the country; I merely caused him to be smuggled out of Baluchistan.”

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: Different (sub)genres #2 The Marquis of Alverstoke, wealthy, vain, and immensely bored, sees no reason why he must put himself to any trouble for anyone at all. But when he agrees to sponsor a beautiful young woman’s debut in society, he can’t help but become tangled up with her managing older sister. I read Georgette Heyer’s romances sparingly. Not because I dislike them, but indeed the opposite – I adore their sharp humor, hijinks, and immersive historical setting – and I don’t […]

This was her life. And it was wonderful, and it should be enough.

Behind the Scenes by Karelia Stetz-Waters

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This was such a frustrating reading experience for me. I started out really engaged. I loved the tone, the characters were interesting, I loved the pugs and I wanted see how Rose and Ash would come together. By a third of the way through I was flagging and by the end I was frustrated. Rose is single, successful, the owner of two pugs, and a little bored. Rose is on track to become partner in a business consulting firm. Ash is struggling, her career and […]

“You want to know if they’re the mittens I wore to Biden’s inauguration. That’s all anyone wants to talk about these days: mittens, mittens, mittens.”

Feel the Bern by Andrew Shaffer

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries #1 When Crash, a new intern working for Bernie Sanders, accompanies her boss up to a small-town festival in Vermont, the last thing she expects is to discover a dead body – or that Bernie will insist on trying to solve the mystery. A few years ago I read Hope Never Dies, a comic mystery where Obama and Biden team up in the post-2016 election season to uncover the truth behind an Amtrak conductor’s death. Now Shaffer has […]

“We are dreamers and makers because that is how we forged ourselves.”

All the Things They Said We Couldn’t Have by T.C. Oakes-Monger

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All the Things They Said We Couldn’t Have  is a gorgeous collection of essays and stories centering the joy of being trans. Tash Oakes-monger is a trans, nonbinary British writer. They don’t sidestep the difficulties of being trans in a hostile world, but illuminate the joy and life that comes with existing in the world as your true self. I found myself starting each morning by reading a couple of selections. I find value in joy for its own sake, and it is the reason […]

A Few Squirts of a Turkey Baster

Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings by Chrysta Bilton

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: New to you authors #1 Chrysta and her sister are the daughters of a dynamic and damaged woman, a single lesbian who yearned for a child in the rather unaccepting 1980s – and found her ideal sperm donor in a hair salon. But both Debra and Jeffrey hid many secrets from their children. There’s that oft-quoted opening sentence of Anna Karenina – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I thought of that quote, and how […]



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