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 Beautiful Dropkick to the Heart

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin

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Alias is one of those tv shows that I just missed. Never really thought about it until 15 years after it debuted. I knew people watched it, I knew it was a thing, but I didn’t watch it. This summer, though, I started checking out all of the Alias DVDs at the library on a whim. Since then, I’ve become something of a Jennifer Garner completionist. This coincided nicely with my quest to become a Timothy Olyphant completionist. They co-starred in a rom-dramedy (?) called […]

Doctor Strange Explains Why Time Travel is Possible

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

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Ever since I’ve started traveling more for my new job, I’ve gotten back into audiobooks. (I liked them in college because of the long drives to and from school.) Long audiobooks stress me out because of library due dates, so this short four-discer read by a celebrity was perfect for a quick round trip through North Texas. In The Order of Time, theoretical physicist/brainiac Carlo Rovelli poetically and accessibily skims the surface of our understanding(s) of time. He includes a wide but shallow overview of theories […]

An Honest and Gracious Look at the Complexities of Adoption

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

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From now on, when people ask what being adopted is like, I’ll just smile and tell them to read this book. It’s all in here. The simultaneous emotions of feeling special because you were chosen by a family and worthless because your parents didn’t want you. The confusion of not knowing who exactly you are, or whether you should feel thankful that you were taken in or annoyed that human right was even in question. Who are your “real” parents, if there is such a […]

Scribotherapy

Writing to Save Your Life: How to Honor Your Story Through Journaling by Michele Weldon

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Writers love reading, writing, and reading about writing. If you ask any writer to name some impactful books that have encouraged their craft, I guarantee you they will be able to pound out a list of 3-5 books immediately. My personal list includes If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland, On Writing by Stephen King, and any Jack Kerouac poem (they’re not usually specifically about writing, but always about living, and writing is about living, so I count Kerouac). I’m not quite sure where I found out […]

More Marlowe

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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“Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.” “What’s the clean side?” “I never saw it. Let’s have a drink.” If quotes like that excite you, and you tend to view the world through a haze of cigarette smoke and gimlet fog, then this book could very well be for you. The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler’s sixth novel featuring the jaded private dick with a heart of…silver, Philip Marlowe. It’s not the best in the series, but it’s towards the top. […]

A Small and Compelling Fictional Look at 90s Startup Culture

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

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AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire” is one of my all-time favorite shows. When it recently ended (and stuck the landing, might I add) I was craving something very niche – a humane look at the tech world in the 1990s, and the people in that world. Thank goodness for the Net, because the Halt and Catch Fire’s subreddit developed a recommended reading list. That’s how I found writer/artist Douglas Coupland’s microserfs. It’s a novel about some low level Microsoft employees (microserfs) who decide to strike […]



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