Cannonball Read 10

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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octothorp

I buy books with alarming frequency and will be on maternity leave March through June. As I get itchy if I stay home too long with nothing to do, I'm hoping to fix both problems in one go.

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octothorp's Reviews:

Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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So I bought a house.  Moved my mother in with us in her own apartment. Sold her place. Renovated our old one to ready it for rental.  Got half new staff at work. Raising the tiny one.  It’s been a bit since I’ve posted, but life has been hectic.  Nothing like a nice relaxing read to soothe my jangled nerves, so of course I pick The Handmaid’s Tale to read (and make my coworker book club cohorts read for our first selection.) I’m a masochist. You know the plot, so did I.  It was my third time through.  I won’t […]

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9/17/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:39 |

Fractal and fractured

Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia millet

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The work this book most reminded me of wasn’t actually a book; despite having no similarities in characters or plot, the FEELING it left me with was exactly like the movie It Follows.  I was done reading this and had the same queasy wrongness that I did after watching the dissonant film about a sexually transmitted haunting. Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a woman who begins having auditory hallucinations at the birth of her daughter and the group of fellow sufferers in the hotel where she is hiding from her ex.  …Having written that summary, being stalked by an ex […]

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6/24/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:38 |

Everyone wants to be Malcolm Gladwell

Contagious by Jonah Berger

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I feel like ever since The Tipping Point, everyone and their dog has tried to write some version or expansion of that book, including Malcolm Gladwell himself.  I’ve even loved some of those books, particularly Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, which is similar to (and referenced by) Contagious, but suffers by comparison. It’s interesting to explore what makes ideas worth spreading, why certain concepts “stick” with us instead of flashing in the pan, but this book doesn’t stick with any of its examples long enough to make an impact. At 200 pages it’s too short and too general […]

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6/16/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:37 |

The power of Margaret Atwood compels you!

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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I liked this a lot, even if the central message can be boiled down to “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and that’s as provocative a statement as “water is wet.” A frame tale where academics use historical documents to reconstruct a past much like our present as gender imbalance creates a crisis point and reveal their own biases in the interpretation is gonna get compared to Margaret Atwood for obvious reasons.  To say this is not The Handmaid’s Tale is no slight to Alderman; even Atwood’s worst books are beautifully, elegantly, intricately written. Even the Rockies look like gravel […]

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6/10/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:36 |

Alton Brown best watch the throne

The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt

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So I know that per cannonball rules graphic novels are countable toward the goal, but I’m not counting mine as it feels like a cheat to me; I love comics hard, but I’d make cannonball in a week if I counted em.  I was a longtime lurker and was an observer for CB1 even if I only joined at CB9, and remember thinking “well duh” when they were excluded from the inaugural readathon. As I had a half decade vacation from the mothership, I’m not positive when the rules changed, but I’m beholden to my standard; it just feels wrong […]

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6/4/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:35 |

All glory to the hypnotoad.

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty

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You guys, I may have lost perspective on whether Liane Moriarty is a good author or not.  I kinda don’t care; I’ve been devouring her novels like cupcakes. If you’re looking at the nutritional info on a cupcake, you’re doing cupcakes AND nutrition wrong. There was a long weekend, I was at the beach, and I certainly didn’t feel like A Brief History of Time. Anyway, this book centers on middle class life in Australia, so it’s a real departure for Moriarty.  (I honestly wonder if I subconsciously bump up my estimation of her skills because she writes about a […]

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5/31/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:34 |

Chad, you magnificent son of a bitch

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

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My question to the bookseller when I saw this remaindered was “is this about baseball? Because I don’t care about baseball.” I’ve tried, my dad was a longtime Tigers fan (don’t worry, he’s fine, I used the past tense because all Detroit fans see reason eventually) and I’ve been a good sport and attended many a ball game in my day.  I never saw the point until I reached drinking age, and then realized the quantity of beer required to make a bunch of guys standing around in a field would send me into liver failure even if I attended […]

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5/27/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:33 |

Welp, I was warned.

Failure is an option by H. Jon Benjamin

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You know that parable about the scorpion and the turtle? (Note: I almost certainly have the animals wrong, but for reasons that will become obvious, I’m not looking it up). The scorpion asks the turtle to take it across a river, turtle balks, scorpion points out they’ll both drown if he stings the turtle, turtle takes the scorpion halfway across when he gets stung.  Turtle’s dying words amount to “WTF, bro?” and the scorpion says “you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.” I’m almost certainly conflating two fables, but I’ll be dammed if I spend more […]

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

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5/27/2018 | 's CBR10 Review No:32 |


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