Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About Halbs

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I'm left-handed! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Halbs's Quick Questions interview.)

Halbs's Reviews:

A Helpful Guide to Completing NaNoWriMo

No Plot? No Problem! Revised and Expanded Edition: A Low-stress, High-velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

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I suspect that many Cannonballers are familiar with National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. For the past 20 years, every November a bunch of writers all over the world dedicate November to completing a 50,000 word novel. Why 50,000? It’s about the size of Fahrenheit 451, Fight Club, The Great Gatsby, and lots of other great books. To “win” NaNoWriMo, you have to write an average of 1,667 words a day. Prior to 2019 I had participated in NaNoWriMo three or four times […]

I’m a Little Better at Madden Now

Football For Dummies, 6th Edition by Howie Long

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When I was growing up I played baseball, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and lacrosse. I also ran triathlons and was a regular mountain biker and gymnast. For some reason, football never appealed to me. I didn’t even like watching it on tv until I was in college. So, I missed out on a lot of the fundamental of the game. While I obviously had a lot of interest in sports, the football lack of knowledge felt like a glaring deficit. Also, my friends almost always beat […]

Coming of Age with Hurricanes and Ghosts and Jessie’s Girl

Joyland (Hard Case Crime) by Stephen King

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Given the book’s pulpy cover with a buxom redhead, I thought Joyland would be some kind of hard-boiled exploitationy romp. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s actually a quiet,  classic Stephen King-type coming of age story, albeit one for twenty-somethings instead of kids. The story swirls around events at an independent amusement park in 1970s North Carolina called Joyland. The park has a mysterious old owner, always impeccably dressed (I pictured Atlanta Falcons’ club owner Arthur Blank) with a twinkle in his eye. It […]

You Can’t Hate Yourself Into Health

The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy by Caroline Dooner

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Earlier this year I’ve reviewed a book about disordered eating and mentioned that eating disorders were common in my profession. After reading that book, I did what any smart person does; I read the comments on the internet! Really! There are some useful subreddits about disordered eating and intuitive eating, and many of those mentioned actor/creative Caroline Dooner’s The F*ck It Diet. I honestly dismissed the book because of its trendy use of f*ck in the title. It felt like it was screaming, “This isn’t your parents’ […]

The Twenty-Six Year Old Virgin

Losing It by Emma Rathbone

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I’m a sucker for coming of age stories, and I’ve read and watched a lot of them, but the premise for this one brings an unexpected combination of things: A woman in her mid-twenties, formerly a collegiate swimmer, can’t figure out her life so she moves to SEC-country to live with a plate-painting aunt and to lose her virginity. It goes ok. The protagonist is Julia Greenfield, the kind of character that might live in Stars Hollow or the dorm in Undeclared. She’s drifting through […]

Hallmark After Dark!

Esther: Royal Beauty by Angela Hunt

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This book was recently on one of the Amazon daily deals lists, so I bookmarked it for future reading and gave it a go. It seemed like an interesting mix of religious romance (think Hallmark), historical fiction, and a mashup of Jewish and Persian culture. It was pretty much all of those things! If you look up the book on Amazon or Goodreads you can see it’s in the three-part “Dangerous Beauty” series also featuring Delilah (of Samson fame) and Bathsheba (of David killing her […]



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