Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

And the Rose Goes Oh No

Here For the Wrong Reasons by Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: review. I read this based on the review here.  My journey into sapphic romance continues with this fun little number. Also, before I begin, the women who co-wrote this apparently fell in love each other while writing it, which is the most adorable thing ever. And in the last romance I read, the writers were a wife-wife team. So maybe I have a thing? Or maybe it’s just coincidence. Either way, I don’t follow The Bachelor or shows like […]

Side Quest Central

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

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Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is a pretty good continuation of the Carl and Donut dungeon crawl. The characters and seat of the pants problem solving are still there, the dark humor that’s both tragic and still entertaining is still there. Plot-wise this volume gets thin; much like the side quest emphasis (new feature of this volume), there is not a lot of progress in the main overall situation. There’s also isn’t  a ton of character development beyond the “game character” that everyone has to perform to […]

“Last week I considered going jogging in flip-flops just to remind myself how sex sounds.”

The True Love Experience by Christina Lauren

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StoryGraph Easy Reading Challenge 25: A book with two authors Felicity “Fizzy” Chen loves her life and career as a romance writer. The problem is that she’s suffering from a bad case of writers’ block, and when she’s asked about her personal life in interviews or author panels, it’s not like she can confess to never actually having been in love, right? A romance writer should surely have experienced romantic love at some point? With all of her friends happily coupled up, she’s also getting […]

You’re the right kind of sinner to release my inner fantasy.

Here for the Wrong Reasons by Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang

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“I don’t have to sleep with him on our Honeymoon,” Lauren says. “They actually encourage you to just spend the night, like, kissing. Talking about vulnerable stuff you wouldn’t want to discuss on-camera.” “Right. And there’s a lot of vulnerable stuff you need to tell him,” Damian says. “For instance, you need to tell him you don’t like guys.” ― Annabel Paulsen and Lydia Wang, Here for the Wrong Reasons She didn’t see rampant homophobia so much as she never saw a happy gay future […]

Renovation Horrorshow (Or “I don’t deserve to be haunted by cows”)

Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

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Take reality TV ghosthunting, marry it with reality TV home makeover and then write a book about a Production Assistant (PA) working on said show and you get – Haunt Sweet Home!    And if you are me, you get a book that started stressing me out even before we got to the creepier bits. Mara is our lead character and she is sort of adrift. She’s an only child, the youngest cousin in a sprawling family of musicians (except she has no musical talent), […]



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