Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Everybody effing read this.

Educated by Tara Westover

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“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose […]

Don’t let the cover mislead you. There are no grizzlies on the Appalachian Trail.

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I added this book to my TBR the very first day I joined Goodreads in July 2008, so yes I do feel accomplished for finally having read it. And it was a good time! I was a bit worried based on a few reviews I’d read ahead of time that it would be dated, and it was a tiny bit (mostly in some jokes Bryson makes that read a little fatphobic to my 2018 eyes and ears, but would have been absolutely bog standard in […]

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”

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I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at […]

My favorite book of 2018

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It’s official: I have the yips. I finished reading this book three weeks ago, but every time I’ve tried to write a review, I freeze, not because I have nothing to say but because I can’t seem to calm my mind enough to write the review this book deserves.  For you see: Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is my favorite book of the year. Chee shares essays about his life and writing career, keeping the subjects separate at first, then integrating them […]

I too did not like this. #CBRBingo #Blackout!?

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Well I tell you what, this book. It was just unpleasant. I would not have picked this up if it weren’t for bingo, and none of the other choices looked at all appealing. I thought, well if you pick that one at least you won’t  be bored! And that was true. But my version of not being bored mostly consisted of me yelling at my audiobook about how much I disliked almost everything that was going on. Maybe she is a different author now but […]

All of this has happened before.

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“Eddie sat us all down as the cast and went, ‘The show’s going to go for five years. Five years. Every episode is going to be like a movie. Keep your powder dry. We’re in here for the long haul. Nobody’s to make fun of this. There’ll be enough people anyway who want to cut a swath in us some way or rubbish the idea, or they’re not going to be fully on board, because we’ve got this title.‘Battlestar Galactica—that’s a blessing as well as […]



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