Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Difficult Women, Trauma, and Romance (Bingos #4 & 5)

The Trouble with Hating You by Sajni Patel

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The Trouble with Hating You is not your typical Romance read, even though Patel is working within and against established tropes, and I liked it better for it. This is definitely an enemies to lovers romance (the title pretty much announces it) and in it we have Liya Thakkar,  a happily single successful biochemical engineer, who has a very strained relationship with her parents and has been very clear that she is not interested in being set up with a potential spouse. The moment she […]

Plateaus of Spasmodic Weirdness

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

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Lenore Beadsman’s life becomes very complicated all of a sudden when her great-grandmother and twenty-five other people vanish from a nursing home, her cockatiel starts talking without pause, and the telephones at the company she works for go crazy. While looking for her missing great-grandmother, she has to confront other members of her family and her family’s history, and acknowledge the lack of control she has over her own life. Lenore is sort of a blank canvas that others project their needs on, for instance, […]

A lock for every key, even if some are weird and corkscrew shaped (CBR12Bingo 2: Orange

Nature's Nether Regions by Menno Schilthuizen

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The jargon problem we talked about in my review of the last book? Yeah, it’s in evidence here. I feel bad, because Schilthuizen very obviously tries hard to avoid it, naming the nether regions in question as closely as he can to their human equivalent, but I got lost in all the pedipalps and ovipositors and couldn’t make heads or tails of much of the book (the difference between heads and tails being kind of important when talking about sexual reproduction). This was dry (again, […]

An Orange Cover by a Green (CBR12Bingo: Orange – Double Bingo)

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

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I really liked this book and wasn’t expecting to. It was a dollar and I can’t resist a bargain, but I was pretty underwhelmed by The Fault in Our Stars – didn’t hate it but didn’t understand why it was a blockbuster. It’s kind of a recurring problem with teen romances – teenage romances don’t last (well, typically. I met my husband at 18. We were children. Our being together makes little to no sense) – so you know they’re not gonna live happier ever […]

A dream is a wish your heart makes (Cannonball!)

Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater

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#CBR12 Bingo: Orange (would also work for Fresh Start) This is the start of a new series, so it stands alone. You don’t have to have read Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle series, starting with The Raven Boys, but it gives a lot of useful background to Ronan and the other Lynch brothers.   Official book description: The dreamers walk among us . . . and so do the dreamed. Those who dream cannot stop dreaming – they can only try to control it. Those who are dreamed cannot have their […]

Doctor Ain was recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

Orange World by Karen Russell

The Fall by Albert Camus

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield

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CBR12Bingo – Gateway (Author) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever: 4/5 Stars This is one of those books that I spent multiple years trying to get myself through. I read one of the stories “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” awhile ago and really liked it. It’s almost like a play on a kind of Twlight Zone type stories with a big twist, but it’s longer and more nuanced and more realized than one of those stories. Instead, it feels like a heavy influence on someone like […]



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