Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

Please read this review if you are a medical professional.

Everything I Learned In Medical School, Miracles & Mayhem in the ER by Sujay Kansagra, Brent Russell

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I have read a lot of this genre – medical memoirs. According to Google, I have read literally almost all of them. I have noticed a pattern, and a problem, and I’m going to use this review space to make a request. 80% of these books follow a formula: author becomes a doctor, a bunch of funny/strange anecdotes from patient interactions or unusual cases. Some do it better than others, but if you stitched them all together into one huge book you’d probably barely notice the seams. You either enjoy the genre or you don’t. Reading an isolated book from it and […]

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10/16/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:31 |

Cracked, plain and simple.

The De-Textbook by Cracked.com

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Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com. The De-Textbook covers a lot of ground while keeping pretty decently to a unifying theme of […]

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10/6/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:29 |

More AIM conversations than I expected.

Where Am I Now by Mara Wilson

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Where Am I Now is Mara Wilson’s memoir – if you don’t remember, she’s the kid from Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire. It’s not a bad book despite the low rating (I’m torn between a 2 and a 3 but since I read it a few weeks ago and remember it with a feeling of mild annoyance, I guess I’m going to round down), it just has the same problems as every memoir by a young adult that I’ve ever read: a lack of/really odd sense of perspective, Very Important Lessons wrung out of trivial-seeming events, and an ending that doesn’t […]

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10/6/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:28 |

A really boring review about a really funny book.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

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Tina Fey, man. What even is there to say? It’s her memoir. It’s really, really weird that I picked it up at all because there’s not much on this planet that I’m less interested in than celebrity memoirs. I’m an ISTJ, I’m interested in a lot of things, but not that. I reluctantly read Leah Remini’s book Troublemaker because I was curious about Scientology and it seemed like an accessible book about it, but read the parts about her life and career and behind the scenes stuff as fast as I could because I honestly just do not care. This […]

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9/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:27 |

I did not enjoy it.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

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And I’m pretty bummed about it. I wanted to like it. I liked the first half, in which nerd genius Laurence and young witch Patricia meet in middle school and become half-assed friends. I liked its many, many beautiful lines. I liked young Patricia and to a small degree, adult Patricia. I liked that it was a book by a trans woman that got mainstream attention without her trans-ness being the reason. I liked the cover art. I liked that a nonbinary character who used they/them pronouns was included in a very matter of fact way. I loved enthusiastically picturing Mr. […]

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9/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:26 |

a·sy·lum (noun): shelter or protection from danger.

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne

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This book is probably not what you’re expecting. It’s mostly photos, and it’s about closed “insane asylums.” Are there spooky photos of sweeping, ruined staircases? Yep. Rooms piled high with abandoned, old-fashioned medical equipment? You bet. Peeling paint? Pages of it. Overgrown grounds? Yes. That is what we’ve come to expect (or at least what I have come to expect) from books about defunct mental institutions, and this one technically delivers that. The difference is the entire tone. In the 10 or 15 dense pages of background in the beginning of the book, Payne reminds us of the definition of […]

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9/30/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:25 |

Getting woke for beginners.

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

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It’s kind of hard to review this book without sounding like a jackass. I really wanted to love it based on the salty cover and title, and I think I was just really prepared to be the “you” in question, get called on my bullshit, and, well, do better. Luvvie is a super likable and engaging writer, and parts of it were great. The first half was more about her views and anecdotes on life, people, friendship, money, dating. Nothing groundbreaking but there was some really funny stuff there. I read this six months ago and still occasionally think about […]

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9/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:24 |

In which my sweet Granny comes up once again.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

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I guess I should’ve expected how close to home this would hit: the subtitle sums it up. It revolves around the oral histories of women who were sent to homes for unwed mothers in the 1940s-1960s, their nearly-always coerced adoptions, their lives after surrendering, their reunions if they ever occurred. I am part of a birth family: my mother relinquished my two younger siblings for adoption, and it defined my childhood. Adoption is such a sore nerve, I almost never read about it. Besides which, my own grandmother was an unwed mother in 1965 and had a hasty and doomed […]

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9/6/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:23 |


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