Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About AnnaCollier

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

AnnaCollier's Reviews:

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 […]

An Updated Country House Mystery

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party tells the story of a group of old college friends getting together for a New Year’s celebration at a remote lodge in the Scottish Highlands. The group includes four couples (one with a baby in tow), and one single woman. The group largely orbits around the glamorous Miranda, but various members have their own histories and conflicts. There is a mysterious Icelandic couple staying at the lodge as well. As the old friends drink, celebrate, and reminisce, and snow starts […]

Just in Time for Oscars Night!

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris

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Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood tells the story of the five films nominated for Best Picture of 1967 at that year’s Academy Awards: Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night. This book was recommended on a recent episode of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, so I decided to check it out, despite the fact that I had only seen one of the […]

Moving Beyond Black and White: An Immigrant’s Perspective on Race in the United States

Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America by Sharmila Sen

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Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America is a memoir written by Sharmila Sen, an Indian American woman and professor of English at Harvard University. The book is short (under 200 pages) and divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a brief prologue which talks broadly about what it means to be an immigrant, focusing on issues of race and anger (particularly the pressure to hide one’s anger, concealing it behind a façade of smiles and jokes). Chapter 1 describes her […]



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