Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


We All Know MLMs Are A Bummer, But Here Is More Proof

Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

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Best for: Those interested in a compelling history of pyramid schemes and their evolution into multi-level marketing schemes. In a nutshell: Author Read provides the history of pyramid schemes and the modern turn to MLMs, framed on the backdrop of a Mary Kay consultant named Monique. Worth quoting: “We are taken care of as consumers, not as human beings.” Why I chose it: I find MLMs disgusting and fascinating. Review: What an great read. Author Read took a topic that is definitely intriguing, but managed […]

Get in touch with your inner wolf

Fan Service by Rosie Danen

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I really loved Fan Service. It touched on so many things, but what I loved most was the way Rosie Danen dug into conforming to expectations versus authenticity. Devin Ashwood is a washed up actor who badly wants to be back in the role for which he is best known – Colby Whitaker werewolf FBI agent. Alex Lawson was once the Moderator on the biggest fan site for the tv show, The Arcane Files. Both are treading water. When Devon is caught on video actually […]

The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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I recently decided to re-read The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (it was my choice for my book group). It was as fun as I remembered. Carter’s sexy takes on traditional fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Puss in Boots” is at times over-the-top in its prose, humor, and horror – which suits her feminist takes on damsels in all sorts of distress perfectly. She delivers a great vampire tale, “The Lady of the House of Love,” too.  But I think […]

No homo for Brad Pitt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Reimagining or retelling of a classic CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: History   Patroclus is exiled from his father’s kingdom after he accidentally kills a boy and is sent into fosterage with King Peleus. Here is where he meets Achilles, whose mother is the sea nymph Thetis. Achilles is supposed to become the greatest warrior who ever lived, and trains diligently to achieve this goal. While they are vastly different, Patroclus and Achilles become sworn companions, and Patroclus accompanies Achilles to train […]

“If a book is well-written, I always find it too short”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

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4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]

“His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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Originally a long-form article written in 1946, this is the story of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a follow up from decades on documenting the ups and downs of the survivors’ lives. This far on from the event, the enormity of the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is commonly known, even if it’s still playing out even today. As such it’s rather hard to fully understand how much of a sensation this book was at the time […]



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