Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Former ethical hacker who stopped hacking but kept being ethical.

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I refuse to research this any further, by which I mean, at all

In The Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

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What do you know about Sigmund Freud? I’ll tell you what I *think* I know. I *think* he was a very early investigator into the realm of human psychology, and tried to help his patients to identify the root causes of their malaise. I also *think* he formulated incredibly elaborate and detailed ideas around the general common causes of psychological distress, and I *think* this was based mostly on, like, 40 patients? Something like that. And a lot of his theories involved butts and other […]

Boooooo Trash DON’T

The October Country by Ray Bradbury

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This was a Did Not Finish, on account of I hated it. Hokay, so, The October Country. This is a collection of Bradbury short stories, and the first one is about a dwarf (it’s called, inventively, “The Dwarf”) who is a regular at a carnival with a house of mirrors where there’s a room where he can see himself as tall, and of course that’s all he wants to do and isn’t it so self-evident that it’s grotesque and he’s grotesque and he couldn’t possibly […]

Kraft mac-n-cheese, but there’s some ham & broccoli mixed in

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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Scythe, by Neal Shusterman, is a high-concept dystopian YA that came out a little later (2016) than some of the blockbuster successes of the subgenre — which is a damn shame, because it’s extremely competently done. Way way way better than, say, Divergent or The Maze Runner. The world-building premise is that society has conquered natural death thanks to the emergence of an all-governing, all-wise AI called the Thunderhead, and the subsequent development of cures and healing nanites that can revitalize people if they die — […]

This was very good and I hope I never open it again

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

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Even if you are not a poetry person, there is a strong chance you have read the title poem in Maggie Smith’s Good Bones. Why? Because, I regret to say, it gets passed around every time there’s a notable school shooting. And that is often. It’s the one that goes: Life is short, though I keep this from my children. […] I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could […]

Don’t talk to cops. Or reporters. And never, ever, ever Mike Wallace.

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

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“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” “Call me Ishmael.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Allow me to nominate The Journalist and the Murderer‘s opening line for inclusion in the pantheon: Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. She’s talking, really, […]

Miserable people described beautifully

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Full disclosure, I did not finish. That is, Homesick for Another World is a collection of short stories, and I finished several of the stories, and I decided I got the picture of what was on offer here and it wasn’t for me. “An Honest Woman” was the last one I finished, so I made it through about half of them. Ottessa Moshfegh is an absolutely incredible observer and her use of language and specificity is just … each individual sentence is like a little […]



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