Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You could call T. Rex the James Dean of dinosaurs: it lived fast and died young.”

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

by 6 Comments

This, friends, is a dinosaur. I believe Pesto’s ancestors would be confused by him, but that’s the beauty of nature. It’s super weird and always doing unexpected things. This book manages to impart a lot of information about the evolution, time on earth, and extinction of (most) dinosaurs while at the same time being very readable and fun to consume. At one point the author uses the phrase “crow-sized weirdos with wings on their arms and legs” to describe a species of dinosaur that differed […]

One seed

Big Tree by Brian Selznick

by Leave a Comment

While I did not completely love the grainy illustrations of Big Tree by Brian Selznick, I understand the reason for them and appreciate them. And there were several that were more fleshed out, but they felt few and far between. The story is a mature environmental tale with spiritual elements that is told by two seeds from a seed pod from Mama Sycamore. It does not sound like it makes sense, but it does, even if sometimes the flow of the story felt to be not as […]

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

by 4 Comments

When I was looking at the 2022 Read Harder Challenge for the first time and saw #9: “Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest”, I knew without looking what that book would be, even though I haven’t looked at the beginning of my list in years. And that’s because I’ve been avoiding this book for as long as I’ve wanted to read it. Just one word for you: supervolcano. In Bryson’s signature breezy, humorous, yet intelligent style, he will explain to you […]

Breaking Brontosaurus News

by 2 Comments

I loved My Beloved Brontosaurus. I really did. I was trying to pinpoint some sort of flaw as a reason why I would rate this book anything other than five stars, and I couldn’t. Maybe you’re not into science or dinosaurs (if that is the case, why did you pick this book up to begin with?). But I do love dinosaurs, truly, and the author takes some 200 years of paleontological research, including controversial updates, and synthesizes it into 222 pages of accessible, engaging science. […]

An unhappy Danish murder mystery with a science twist

by Leave a Comment

Perhaps because of all the praise heaped on this book, I found The Dinosaur Feather to be one of the more disappointing murder mysteries I’ve read in a while. In a nutshell, the plot is centered on a furious and long-running cross-Atlantic brawl between two respected paleontologists over whether birds evolved from dinosaurs or are their own separate species (something which has been definitively resolved since, which in my view takes the wind a little bit out of the author’s sails). The strange and very […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo