Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

NPR: the book

Spark: how creativity works by Julie Burstein

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So, I find myself again reviewing a book I enjoyed in many ways but which fell short of its stated goal. I liked reading these interviews, but felt that they were united more by their NPR-iness than by anything they had to say about the creative process. I am a fan and supporter of NPR (making me atypical for this site, I know), but I never really differentiated between the segments, other than to squeal with joy at “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” or “Car Talk;” or curse my fate any time I heard Garrison Keillor’s voice. As such, I’m […]

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6/18/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:23 |

Too much of the latter, not enough of the former

Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman

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This is my first review in weeks, in part because reading this took soooooo long, and I knew I’d be reading this book for a solid year if I didn’t commit to finishing it. As it stands, it took me three months of false starts to completely read its four hundred pages. It’s a hard book to assess, in part because I found the subject matter interesting, and my favorite parts of the book probably would need to be trimmed in order to make it more cohesive and more engaging.  For content it’s a five star book, but for organization […]

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6/18/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:22 |

Ask a Manager: The Book

Company by Max Barry

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I found this book via recommendation in the comments of the “Ask a manager” advice blog run by Alison Green, and as soon as I got a few pages in it was pretty obvious why. This book is essentially that website in novel form. The plot is essentially Ender’s Game by way of Office Space; a corporate drone realizes that all the bureaucratic frustrations in his job have been artificially and intentionally inflicted on him, but the tone is solidly comedic. It’s an amusing if slight book. Anyone who has worked in a cube farm will relate to the descriptions […]

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6/4/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:21 |

Not another thing, please

And another thing... by Eoin Colfer

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I forget where I read it, only that it is not my own observation, but someone put my most frequent problem with fantasy and sci-fi best: the more made up words it contains, the less likely I am to enjoy the book. This is a fairly short book that is long on nonsense. My eyes just glazed over half the text for a lack of intelligible prose to grab on to. A continuation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series written by Douglas Adams, it took me twice as long to read its 275 pages than an average book […]

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5/29/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:20 |

I swear I didn’t ctrl-z my Ian McEwan review

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Oh, Jeffrey Eugenides, will I ever judge a book of yours fairly after you’ve written Middlesex? This is something of a theme in my reviews in part because I’ll buy books based on the strength of the author’s name if I’ve fallen in love with one of their works, and then they end up in my “I’ll get around to it” pile. But man, I honestly feel guilty with Eugenides because Middlesex is so damn perfect nothing will ever measure up.  It’s a top five – maybe top three – for me, and it’s unfair to ask anything to compare, […]

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5/25/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:19 |

Pretty writing hides a lot…

Saturday by Ian McEwan

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Oh, do I wish some other authors could write like McEwan; I’ve read so many books with poorly executed plots or glimmers of a good idea rendered inert by flat prose. I often joke of my favorite authors that I’d read the phone book if it had their name on the cover, but I didn’t expect to be taken up on it the way McEwan does with Saturday. So, that’s perhaps unfair; things DO happen in the book. It outlines the beginning of the weekend for a prominent British neurosurgeon, and the ways in which his benevolent arrogance affects his […]

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5/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:18 |

How do you double a Yugo’s value? Put gas in the tank.

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason vuic

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I picked this book up after fellow cannonballer Emmalita mentioned it as an example of my favorite genre: the failure narrative. I absolutely adore reading about fiascos and how they came to be, and my fellow pajiban steered me right in recommending it. The book is an interesting exploration of how the eponymous car came to be a national punchline. I know nothing about cars aside from what Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond tell me, and as I was in single digits during the Yugo’s heyday, the exploration was a mystery to me in a way it may […]

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5/13/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:17 |

As much of the former as the latter

Sex With Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan

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Whoa buddy, is that title not false advertising. Jillian Keenan goes into great depths exploring her sexuality and spanking fetish through the prism of the bard’s plays, and matches the man in bawdy description. This includes a fairly graphic imagined sex scene with A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Helena. Somehow this dodges being pretentious or twee and skips straight to making the reader blush. Which is impressive, as imagined conversations with any fictional characters sounds oh-so-precious, but the cutesiness is undercut by discussing the various erotic merits of a belt versus a hairbrush for spanking. Moreover, unlike many memoirs with a […]

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5/12/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:16 |

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