Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Is Tommy Lee Jones 20 or 100 in this movie?”

Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West

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Official book description: New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Lindy West was once the in-house movie critic for Seattle’s alternative newsweekly The Stranger, where she covered film with brutal honesty and giddy irreverence. In Shit, Actually, Lindy West returns to those roots, re-examining beloved and iconic movies from the past 40 years with an eye toward the big questions of our time: Is Twilight the horniest movie in history? Why do the zebras in The Lion King trust Mufasa–who is a lion–to look out for their best interests? Why […]

out of the way, Mr. Hughes. Let the real stars shine.

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood by Karina Longworth

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You’ve seen The Aviator, yes? If not, maybe you know that it’s about Howard Hughes? Yes- the Spruce Goose guy. Yes, the keep on failing upwards guy. Yes, the “keep your pee in jars” guy. We’ve all heard or seen at least a little bit about Howard Hughes. His reach was wide and heavy, and he swept away businesses, careers, and entire studios in his wake. Karina Longworth, author of Seduction and podcaster extraordinaire, covered Howard Hughes’s Hollywood during a whole season of her phenomenal podcast a […]

A Book of Many Lives in Few Words

The Many Lives of Pusheen the Cat by Claire Belton

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Do you want something that is pretty superficial, colorful, involves few words, and much cutsey-ness? You might be interested in The Many Lives of Pusheen the Cat. Pusheen is the chubby tabby star of many GIF and single panel cartoons, and this book is basically just a compilation of the several variations on the character that have been developed over the years. There’s Pusheen herself (the original cat is a she and according to the starts page for each character variant, they are all gendered […]

Harry Potter is a Herione and Wonder Woman is a Hero

The Heroine's Journey by Gail Carriger

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Warning: this is a review of an at least partially academic book. It gets into theory-world (literary theory) pretty hard. However, it’s also very strongly based in popular culture, mostly to help make the point that the patterns of interest to certain types of theory are influential in stories and entertainment types things beyond “Literature”-with a capital L. The style of the book is also pretty low-key; this is not an insult; it is a statement that although the book tackles some pretty academic conceptual […]

Vroom vroom!

Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars by Paul Ingrassia

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I’m sure the subtitle has you curious, so here are some clues about the fifteen vehicles explored in this great book. Yes, there are only thirteen items listed below, but that’s because a few chapters overlap and include more than one exact make or model of vehicle. The Big Bang Bolsheviks, Nazis, and High-Performance Racers Fins Hitler to Hippies Explosions Iacocca DeLorean, but not that DeLorean Globalisation and Quality Iacocca II Yuppies Iacocca III Red(neck) Dawn Full Gosling Now to the review. The only downside […]

A piece of pop culture history

The Making of Prince of Persia Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner

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A few facts The first video game I ever played was Prince of Persia, I was six years old. My school had a bunch of IBM computers which you could use (after finishing homework) and the only game that actually worked on them was Prince of Persia. Unsurprisingly I never got to actually play it very often (or at all) because somehow the boys always got access to the computers before anyone else could. I did manage to play it one time, and never managed […]



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