Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I buy books faster than I can read them. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: octothorp's Quick Questions interview.)

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The title pretty much gives you the tone

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

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This book was remarkable for nailing a lot of being a teenager in a way that felt authentic to me, and that’s always refreshing. (I remember liking Harold and Maude before **SPOILER ALERT FOR A MOVIE THAT’S PUSHING FIFTY BUT YOU SHOULD STILL ABSOLUTELY SEE SO THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING ** Maude announces she’s taken a lethal dose of pills to commit suicide, and Bud Cort waits a beat long enough for me to lament that movies never show characters reacting like a real […]

Hard to digest through no fault of the book

Gulp by Mary Roach

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I’m a luddite where books are concerned. I have a kindle solely because the spousalthorp got lovingly irritated with me on our Hawaii honeymoon when I read all the books I had packed and we had to go the furthest away from our hotel on the island to the only bookstore, and THEN pack all the books to take with us. They took up a suitcase on their own. I begrudginly concede he may have had a point. That said, I accidentally bought Gulp on […]

Somewhere beyond the sea, cement shoes are waiting for me

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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This might be the first book in a while that I’ve bought from Goodwill that was worth the dollar I paid for it. Manhattan Beach is one of those books that fits together like puzzle pieces; there’s nothing extraneous in this story even if it doesn’t necessarily feel densely plotted. But the themes of fidelity, self-sufficiency, and generational passage resonate quietly in the background.  No character or quirk is wasted. Anna, our protagonist is deeply connected to her father, and drawn in young adulthood to […]

I don’t feel anything

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

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I was really, really, really hesitant to start this book. I am an anxious person by nature. There’s not a single phobia I have, I’ll move your spiders and snakes out of the way and go on all the roller coasters or in any confined space, no problem. But uncertainty? That turns me into a plague demon. No one likes Anxiety Octothorp, including Octothorp.  So even though this book has been recommended to me a dozen times over years, it was a solid year between […]

We can rebuild it, we have the technology

Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg

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When I complain about accidentally buying books that are ostensibly behavioral economics books that turn out to be business books, Charles Duhigg is what I’m usually hoping for. Not everything has to be an academic marvel, and like many of his ilk, Duhigg owes a large debt to Malcolm Gladwell for getting people interested in this type of book in the first place, but he always puts out a readable, organized, and interesting read. That said, this book was slightly less cohesive than The Power […]

Rudderless

Spineless by Juli Berwald

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It’s strange how often I find commonalities in the unrelated books I end up reading. I’m gonna review The Gift of Fear here in a bit, and there’s a bit in the last quarter of the book where De Becker writes about creating the MOSAIC tool for the FBI. As I read that I was thinking “didn’t he just talk about this” before I realized another book had a chapter about MOSAIC being used to find a kidnapping victim. Well, I bought this months before […]



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