Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Strange, Fragile, Beautiful World

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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It’s estimated that there are around 7.8 millions animal species on the planet, many of which we know little about. Unfortunately, some may vanish before we can learn much more – which is a pity, because the variety of life on this planet is far more wondrous and strange than anything our imaginations could conjure up. This is a quiet and contemplative peek at the natural world in easy bite-sized installments. Each essay discusses an animal species which threatened in one way or another, covering […]

“a human looking glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those facing her” CBRBINGO – Golden

Q: A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. I’m so glad I took a chance on this one and requested the ARC. It was so much fun! It avoided literally everything that usually makes me avoid reading biographies: the tedious linear structure, the grandiloquence and navel-gazing that comes with writing about a much-lauded (or controversial) figure (and the author trying to “earn it”), and to be honest, the dull bits. Q: A Voyage Around the Queen is not […]

Life on a Cult TV Show – While Also in an Actual Cult!

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz

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CBR16 Bingo: Rings – A lot of people get married in this book – at least four couples, including the author Lenz to the cult leader’s son. Bethany Joy Lenz is famous for playing Haley James Scott in the cult TV show One Tree Hill, but her experience of this time is even stranger than one would expect – she was in an actual cult at the time. I never watched One Tree Hill, but with a premise like that, who cares? Besides, TV show […]

“Don’t stop beginning. Begin and begin and begin. Begin endlessly—that is, without the taint of even eventual ending.”

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld

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Literary critic Becca Rothfeld argues against the modern inclination toward minimalism, and insteads advocates embracing all the messy and irrepressible things that make the human existence so rewarding. I am this book’s target audience, because like Rothfeld I wonder if in the process of streamlining our world we have reached an unpleasantly bland and bloodless zeitgeist. I enjoy colorful and unusual clothes and furniture. I find the aesthetic of minimalism boring. I love the over the top pulp literature of yesteryears. I don’t want the […]

FOMO/YOLO, MOFO!

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

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Cbr16bingo Tech I only picked this up in order to fill the Tech square on my bingo card. It’s not the kind of book I would have looked at otherwise — nonfiction with an emphasis on military flights and the space program? Ugh, no thanks. But in Tom Wolfe’s hands, the topic does become more interesting and readable. The book started as an article for Rolling Stone Magazine about that certain quality that the men involved in the early days of the space program seemed to […]

This book itself is also a fiasco, ironically. CBRBINGO – Fiasco

Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops by James Robert Parish

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I keep forgetting to post this review. I think my brain is trying to block out my having read this book on purpose to protect from either, a) dropping dead of a rage aneurysm, or b) dropping dead from the poisonous word salad the author spews on every page. I would not have read this book or even had it on my radar but Cannonball Read’s BINGO board this year had a ‘FIASCO’ square, and when I found this book I thought it would be […]



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