Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If you liked Tiger King…

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

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It’s a testament to Susan Orlean that she can make any subject seem interesting, but she didn’t have to work that hard with John Laroche. He’s the spiritual predecessor of Joe Exotic, a toothless obsessive known for big-picture ideas improperly realized who, with members of the Florida Seminole tribe, was arrested for taking bromeliads and orchids out of protected land in the Everglades to create a greenhouse business as a moneymaker for the natives. His main objective is to cultivate the Ghost Orchid, an orchid […]

Predictably informative and surprisingly interesting

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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Susan Orlean, is a woman of many hats. She is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of many books and articles, including The Orchid Thief. Apparently she is also a con artist, because she somehow convinced me to continue reading a book about libraries to the last page. In the same vein, The Library Book just might cross as many genres as hats worn by Susan. First The Library Book is non-fiction. Orlean educates us about libraries in general – including their […]

Non Fiction End of Year Round- Up

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo- and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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I think it is safe to say I completely fell off the CBR wagon but as the year draws to a close, and my office currently has a total of five people in, I wanted to try and get caught up on reviews. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable task until I wrote out every book title I still needed to review and realized I was nineteen books behind while still actively reading two other books. So in lieu of complete, well thought out reviews […]

Nothing in the verdict helped solve the mystery of the stolen orchids.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

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Susan Orlean does a great job being amazed by people without condescending to them. John Laroche is quite the character and were he to be a subject of a podcast or a presence on the internet, he’d likely milkshake duck as soon as possible. This book follows Susan Orlean’s interaction with Laroch, a roughneck Florida orchid enthusiast who is somewhere between amateur botanist, entrepreneur, and conman, living among the conmanest state in the union, Florida. This book provides background on the swamps and land development […]

It’s a library book about libraries!!

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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Once again, I didn’t know what I was reading until I opened it and silly me had assumed this was a novel. But it was SO MUCH BETTER. Also that I got it from my library. That made me happy too. The Library Book is a chronicling of the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, focused around the 1986 fire that raged for seven hours and destroyed hundreds of thousands of books. It’s just as horrifying as it sounds and it has been impossible to […]

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. “

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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This book was so interesting! No wonder it had such a long wait at my library. The Library Book is about a crime — a massive, horribly destructive fire at the L.A. Public Library in 1986 — but it’s so much more than that. Orlean has gathered the stories of dozens of real life characters, and told them against the backdrop of the biggest character of all — the library itself. “In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her […]



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