Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Parts of Gulp are hard to swallow

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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I love Mary Roach’s books. They’re funny and irreverent and very educational. Her use of ridiculous footnotes rivals that of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s Good Omens. So I had really high hopes for Gulp when I first picked it up a few years ago.  Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal is about the human digestive tract, from the mouth all the way down to the exit. It discusses how smell affects taste, the roles of saliva, why poop smells and attempts to make it not smell, […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]

Let’s Start of the Year With a Little Non-Fiction

A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast Asia's Largest Nation by Tim Hannigan

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  As an Australian, I have long lamented the fact that we see ourselves as on the periphery of South East Asia rather than an integral part of the region. And while we spend our time at school mostly learning about the history of the ‘Anglosphere’, we seem to have very little curiosity about our neighbours – and this is rather disappointing. After reading This Earth of Mankind late last year, I realised that there were considerable gaps in my own knowledge of Indonesia, who […]

Map porn

The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching

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As regular haunter of r/mapporn with a large appetite for history, The Golden Atlas was a pretty perfect Christmas gift for me, a gorgeously illustrated book featuring lots of ancient maps and the stories of how the lands depicted on them were discovered. Taking us from antiquity up until the Victorian age, when we finally inked in bits of the last of the world’s unknown lands, some of my favourites were those that were based heavily on conjecture. Whether these were the maps of the […]

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

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I’ve been wanting to read this for years, and my TBR Jar finally plucked this from the pile. There’s just something about that cheeky title that draws you in, but I never got around to it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the titular piece were very underwhelming. It’s about seven pages long, plus an updated postscript. I wanted a lot more from the ideas the book was titled after. Luckily I at least knew going in that this was an essay collection that would be […]

“Reading…is fun to do and it lets you feel superior to other people.”

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

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Josh Gondelman has been one of my favorite comedians for a while now. I often fall asleep to comedy albums and specials. His second album, Physical Whisper, is frequently in the bedtime rotation and his more recent album, Dancing on a Weeknight, also makes its way in from time to time. He is one of my favorite Twitter people (@joshgondelman). I was so excited when my library hold on his memoir, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results, finally became available. Gondelman begins […]



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