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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This is a Scalzi book, end of message

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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The Kaiju Preservation Society is intended to be 100% escapist, lightweight fun for the reader, and it certainly succeeds at that. I read the whole thing on my first plane flight since 2020, and it went down easy. The protagonist, Jamie Gray, is working as a food delivery driver in the early months of the pandemic when he gets recruited by an old friend to staff an “animal rights organization.” Given the title of the book you may guess approximately what comes next. It turns […]

Can a review be 250 heart emojis, asking for a friend

The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics by Gideon Defoe

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Ah, the dilemma of the book review … when I hate it, I have SO MUCH to say, but when I love it, all I want to do is poke cloves in an orange in the shape of a heart and send it to the author by overnight mail. The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics is the fourth book of a series by Gideon Defoe. I have now read three of the four, and I can’t even contemplate reading the last one (Napoleon, […]

Gosh how zany – The mute secretary is also a stripper(! lolol)

Jumpers by Tom Stoppard

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I picked this up from a library book sale. Jumpers is the first play Tom Stoppard put out after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and even though the persnickety toffs of Concord MA apparently didn’t check it out very often, I thought it showed some promise. The back cover copy is of the “can you believe how wacky” genre, like, “British astronauts are scrapping with each other on the moon, and spritely academics steal about London by night indulging in murderous gymnastics!” If you are […]

The Transition Didn’t Happen AND THEREFORE … What, Michael Lewis?

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

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It started with a search for audiobooks. I am trying to run more (at all) as we get into spring here, and I’ve found that I am too picky about podcasts. There are only a couple I reliably like, and that adds up to maybe two hours of content a week. My preferred drug in podcasts is, I guess, interpretive digestible reporting*(?) so I tried to dig up some unfamiliar-to-me titles from authors who maybe sorta fit into that category. We’ll see how this strategy […]

Linguistics Grad Gets Book Deal, Writes About Cults Instead

Cultish by Amanda Montell

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For the second time this year, I’m gonna downgrade a book that I probably would have liked better if I had different expectations going in. This time the victim of mis-marketing is Cultish, by Amanda Montell. The book jacket promises: Through juicy storytelling and cutting-edge original research [emphasis mine — auntadadoom], Montell exposes the linguistic elements that make a wide spectrum of communities cultish, revealing not only how cult language affects followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate but also how it pervades our modern […]

So You’ve Decided to Try

How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur

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OK, so if book clubs were actually for, like, discussing books? I would recommend this book for your book club, and also I would recommend you set aside like five months of meetings for it or at least four. How to Be Perfect is not itself Perfect but. Every ten pages or so I kept setting it down and just kind of wandering off into my own thoughts about my own life and given how often I was putting it down I had to think […]



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