Cannonball Read 14

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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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 […]

I’d say they should marry other people but they are both annoying aholes so …

The Transformation of Philip Jettan by Georgette Heyer

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I think this is my last Heyer for a while. I feel like such a curmudgeon when I read what’s intended to be a light-hearted romp and find every character revolting. So Georgette Heyer is mainly known for her regency romances, but she also wrote many murder mysteries (one of which was the first and last Heyer I actually enjoyed this year) and some books set in the earlier powdered wig era … and The Transformation of Philip Jettan is one of those. In fact […]

Sophy is fine, Charles is a pill

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

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You realllly need to sell the plus side of a crabby-Darcy character type, or my reaction to any reasonably nice woman ending up with him is gonna be “Ehhhh … I don’t get it.” I enjoyed A Christmas Party earlier this year, the first time I’d read one of Georgette Heyer’s mysteries, and the jacket quotes on The Grand Sophy persuaded me that this would be a fun comical romance. And the setup is indeed fun — Sophy, raised from a young age by her diplomat […]

For the OG Sex and the City fans, if Samantha was the writer

Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King

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Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer is a sweet, sex-positive collection of essays by Rax King. The author frames each essay as “about” a particular pop cultural artifact — Hot Topic, America’s Next Top Model, the Cheesecake Factory — and uses that as a jumping-off point for personal memoir. First, the good: she’s a very skilled writer, and even the chapters that are about cultural moments that I didn’t personally experience (e.g. Degrassi) are well-handled enough that I was able […]

Fun world, solid structure and writing, stop after two “Whys”

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You by Ally Carter

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When you’re a student at a school for spies, which is disguised as a tony all-girls academy, and by the way your mom is the headmistress … falling for a townie is a little tough. I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You is the first in a series about the students at Gallagher Academy — the Gallagher Girls. I’m not sure if all the books in the series focus on the same protagonist (Cammie, the daughter of the headmistress), but […]



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