Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About AnnaCollier

CBR12 participant

Long time reader, first time reviewer. Hoping to write one of these book thingies myself one of these days.

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Easy Money, Raging Tempers

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

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You know that old joke about how the majority of New Yorker cartoons could be captioned “Christ, what an asshole!”?  I thought about that a lot while I was reading Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’N’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.  This book chronicles the work of many major directors of the 1970s, including Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), Robert Altman (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), and Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), […]

Thanks, I’ll Pass

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

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Normally I try to only post positive reviews here, because who wants to be the person putting more negativity into the world, especially in the current moment?  But I am way behind on reviews so I will say: I did not like this book.  This is probably because I am a philistine.  Roxane Gay loved it!  So did NPR!  And the New York Times! Jami Attenberg’s All This Could Be Yours is the story of a family ruled by Victor Tuchman, a rich, awful man […]

The Grass is Always Greener Near the Deserted Medieval Village

A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym is a writer who, strangely, is best known for being underrated. She published a number of books in the 1950s and 1960s, then fell out of fashion. She made a comeback in the late 1970s when both the literary critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin nominated her when asked by the Times Literary Supplement to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century. A Few Green Leaves was Pym’s final book, published shortly after her death in 1980. Pym […]

Well, This Was Unexpectedly Relevant

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

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It was a very odd feeling to be reading a book called “How to Survive a Plague” as the US began closing down to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Covering the time from 1981, when a cluster of gay men in New York city were diagnosed with a rare cancer, to 1996, when effective drug treatments were eventually developed, How to Survive a Plague is a comprehensive history of the AIDS crisis, focusing on the dual roles of scientists and activists in finding a cure. […]

We Love You…Well, Some of Us Do

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

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Is there anything more satisfying than finding someone who shares your unpopular opinions?  I’ll get to We Love You, Charlie Freeman in just a bit, but let me back up for a minute.  About a year ago, I read Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows and fell in love with it.  All My Puny Sorrows is so beautiful and funny and tragic, and the characters feel both universal and totally unique at the same time. I loved the book so much that as soon as I […]



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