Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About KimMiE"

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I love reading nonfiction books, especially ones about nature, zoology, brain chemistry, and psychology. I also love the classics, especially Victorian lit. Mysteries are my go-to relaxing reads, and I read fantasy and sci fi when they come recommended. I'm definitely open to new genres! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: KimMiE”'s Quick Questions interview.)

KimMiE"'s Reviews:

Innocence vs. experience and everything in between

Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

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Poetry lovers, or really anyone who has taken an introduction to English literature class, will recognize the title of this Tracy Chevalier novel as a line from the William Blake poem “The Tyger”: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? “The Tyger” is probably the most famous poem in Blake’s classic poetry collection Songs of Innocence and Experience, first printed by Blake himself in 1789. In Burning Bright, Chevalier borrows heavily from […]

Cheating shmeating! In the mid-19th century, Harvard really knew how to rock a scandal.

Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins

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Ooh, I do love a good period true crime drama. From Erik Larson’s much-lauded Devil in the White City, to Kate Summerscale’s lesser-known The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, to Bruce Chadwick’s I Am Murdered (which I reviewed all the way back for CBR5),  you take a  murder that’s at least a century old, add some period costumes, a few blue collar witnesses pitted against high-brow lawyers, and a lot of research, mix well, and you have a perfect cocktail of historical entertainment. I especially enjoy reading […]

Color me surprised: Someone on the internet thinks this book is racist

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas

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First things first: I want to give a shout out to the Little Free Libraries of the world. A few weeks ago I picked this up from one in my neighborhood and it was my first time borrowing anything from one of those tiny bibliotecas. I’d heard of this novel but might not have been prompted to borrow it if I hadn’t seen it through the friendly little window. I’m inspired to pay it forward by adding something from my “already read” stack when I […]

When we came to the end, we loved it

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

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I picked up this novel because I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, though, as my review states, I was at a loss to explain exactly why I liked it. Ferris’s sense of humor appealed to me, though, and I like authors who don’t claim to have all the answers. Then We Came to the End is his first novel, and it is certainly a curiosity. Written in first-person plural point of view, the narrators’ “we” refers to the employees of an […]

Just when you thought cancer couldn’t suck any more than it already does

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle

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Barbara K. Lipska had already survived two encounters with the dreaded “C” disease when weird things started happening to her brain. In 2009 she fought off breast cancer, undergoing a mastectomy of her left breast, and then, in 2012, she defeated melanoma, or so she thought. That’s the trouble with cancer; you’re never really “cured.” There’s always the chance that it can metastasize somewhere else in your body. For Lipska, a neuroscientist who specializes in studying mental illness, the disease came roaring back in the […]

What stereotype are you most afraid of confirming?

Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude M. Steele

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A group of social psychologists at Princeton University conducted a study in which they asked white male students who were “reasonably athletically inclined” to play ten rounds on a miniature putting course in a laboratory. Some were told nothing about the purpose of the test, while others were told that the test measured natural athletic ability. Those that were told the test measured their athletic ability performed much worse than those who were told nothing about what the test might mean. In the second part […]



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