Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Random Randomness with Random People in Random Places Randomly

A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris

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A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris is basically what you’d expect from the subtitle and if you’re familiar with the author. It’s really just random collection of things seen or thought by the author over 17 years. The title doesn’t become clear until March 2013 and that’s never explained. But that’s probably the point, to make you try to reason it out, if there is actual meaning or if Sedaris just thought it sounded cool. It reads kind of like a stand-up […]

What Do We Do When Doomsday Doesn’t Come?

The Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family by John Glatt

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When Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell meet, they have long held alternate beliefs about souls and the coming of the end times. But together, they advance down the path of delusion, culminating in the murder of Lori’s children Tylee and JJ. I knew of this case from fairly recent developments, when the bodies of the children were found last year, but through this book I learned that the murders had been decades in the making. The author follows Lori and Chad from their childhoods, tracing […]

The Original Elizabeth and Mary

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak

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Two women, rival queens, rule kingdoms that lie side by side. Over the course of decades, they scheme and intrigue and fight both to keep their crowns and to take away the other’s. One will die peacefully, the other violently, and from their actions a dynasty will come to an end. The Dark Queens follows the lives of Brunhild and Fredegund, who were Frankish queens during the 500s. They had extremely disparate origins, with one starting as a Spanish princess and the other as a palace […]

This is why we need FDA regulations!

Bad Blood: Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley startup by John Carreyrou

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I wasn’t aware of Theranos, the blood testing startup which imploded spectacularly in 2018 from one of the USA’s most-hyped new tech companies to bankruptcy and federal investigation, until Elizabeth Holmes, architect of the whole thing, was actually charged with fraud. The Pajiba commentariat pointed me in the direction of 2018’s Bad Blood (since I’m not a fan of podcasts), and it was well worth the read. Carreyrou, an investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, first got interested in the story long after Holmes […]

“Men’s rights is nothing!”

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

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…as the immortal Leslie Knopes notes.  I’ll admit that I’ve stayed away from this because I don’t need more evidence that while notallmen, white men sure do a hell of a lot of damage. However, I’m trying really hard to cultivate outside interests this year, so what the hey. Farrow skillfully balances the line of injecting enough of his personality to be engaging without overtaking the narrative. He appears to be very aware of his celebrity and it’s easy to see how he was able […]

Not so much eternal vigilance as eternal safeguarding

On Liberty by Shami Chakrabarti

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As a long time admirer of her work while director of Liberty and beyond, I was curious to see what a mixture of an autobiography and political polemic would bring to discussions about human rights. Although only written around 2016, the UK she describes feels some distance away from us, and not just because of an unfortunate choice of sandwich filler in Wuhan in 2019. The current Nationality bill under scrutiny looking at the almost arbitrary right of the government to revoke citizenship feels far […]



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