Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

Two books so close as to be indistinguishable

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander

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You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger. – Lee Atwater, 1981 I wrapped up […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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6/13/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:47 |

I was misinformed, then I was wrong, and now I’m at a loss over a 20 year old tragedy

Columbine by Dave Cullen

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I started this review on April 15th with the line, “I don’t like the style of this book.” Which was true at the time, and ultimately led me to abandon reading it until a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite podcast discoveries this year has been one called Martyrmade. It’s a history podcast in the style of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, heavily detailed with long episodes. The man who makes Martyrmade, Darryl Cooper, has another podcast (which I do not recommend, by the way), called The Decline of the West, in which he had an episode on mass shootings. […]

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6/10/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:45 |

May stat round-up!

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I’ve tallied the yearly totals for most users going back to CBR3, and (assuming their review counts are accurate), there are more than 20,134 reviews since 2011. The database currently has over 14,000 reviews, so I’m about 73% of the way complete. That makes me feel better. On with the stats! May stats: 280 reviews (May 2016 saw 275 reviews) Average rating: 3.64 stars (May: 3.69) Most popular book: Life Moves Pretty Fast (Hadley Freeman) and The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli (4 reviews, 2.75 and 3.25 average, respectfully) Most popular author: CS Harris (6 reviews, 4.00 average) Most reviews: vel […]

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6/6/2017 | |

Better than expected

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

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Others have drawn comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and, being the natural conformist that I am, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you like your female mystery novel narrators on the unreliable side, this may be the book for you. Which is a weird burgeoning trope, if, indeed, three books can be considered a trope. Sometimes, a culture just decides that it’s ready for something. We all consume, basically, the same information. So its not surprising that there would be considerable overlap in the work people are doing. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both […]

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6/2/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:44 |

Left Behind in a Shack to eat Chicken Soup with Kirk Cameron. Jesus.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

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There is a pretty good story, here, but it’s lost in the sonorous ramblings of a man too fixated on scenery. Do I need to provide a synopsis? Surely we’ve all seen the movie (not the new one, which I assume is atrocious). In short: it’s a revenge tale, of a first century Jewish man who has his life ruined by a childhood friend, a Roman. Judah Ben Hur spends years as a galley slave, before lucking his way back into wealth and the good graces of Rome. He then takes out his revenge in a fabulous chariot race then […]

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5/25/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:43 |

The breath of longing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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So much has been written about this book here on CBR, I almost had no choice but to read it. But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I finally got it from Overdrive. It took me days to get into it, and I read multiple books in between the early chapters. But I stuck with it because the premise was very good, and it has received near universal praise (both here, and in the broader literary world). Sticking with a book that hasn’t grabbed me just isn’t something I typically do. I’ve given up on books on […]

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5/24/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:42 |

“Uh….weren’t we having a mutiny?”, and other tales…

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

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Well, one other tale, really. After reading Fuzzy Nation on narfna’s suggestion, I quickly delved into the other Scalzi books that I had access to. The first, The Collapsing Empire, was just recently released and is the first in a trilogy (and his first book under a 10 year, 13 book contract that includes a sequel to Lock In and a new book in the Old Man’s War series). The second, Agent to the Stars, is his first novel, self published on his website in 1999. The Collapsing Empire (4.5 stars; reviewed once before, given 4 stars) Humanity has reached […]

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5/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:41 |

In which I show once again that I’m probably better suited to popular fiction

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

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I knew a Holly Golightly once. We met in an art class in high school, and went on to be friends in college, before I fell in love with someone else. We would spend time together after class: she taught me that putting my loofah in with the laundry extended its life and kept it cleaner. I accompanied her on a modeling gig, where the artist she posed for belittled me for pronouncing Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s name without a proper French accent. She ended up allowing a vagrant named Cowboy Bill (if memory serves) to move into her apartment. […]

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5/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:39 |

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