Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

None of the senior leaders…thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.”

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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BINGO: white hot take what an infuriating book–a real choice for the main read of my peaceful cabin-and-lake-and-forest vacation–and just a solid entry in “tech people are the worst sort of rich/powerful people” genre Sarah Wynn-Williams joined Facebook in 2011, after working for the New Zealand embassy in DC for a number of years. She’s painfully, painfully earnest about her motivations–the zealot convert’s belief that Facebook would completely change the paradigm of the global geopolitical landscape–so much so that she basically whinges her way into […]

Real Housewives of Fort Benning

The Wives: A Memoir by Simone Gorrindo

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cbr17bingo Purple Simone is a New Yorker who has just landed her dream job, as an editor.  And now maybe she will have some time to devote to her own writing projects, too.  Her husband, on the other hand, has different plans.  He has joined an elite Army combat unit, and is looking forward to doing his share by shipping out to Afghanistan.  But it’s all good, right, because she can work from home, at whatever Army base home ends up being.  All right, let’s […]

Does this author ever write a bad book?

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel

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Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel This graphic novel is not perfect, but it is darn close. There were just one or two small “bumps” for me. But overall fans will get a huge kick out of this. There is much happening and Bechdel uses their usual wit and observations to get the job done. Even if they cannot get the job of writing their new book or the TV script done. It is life during the years of 2020 to “now” (or around […]

The title I forgot, the book I enjoyed

Hummingbird Heart by Travis Dandro

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Have you requested a book from the library and when you get the notice that it is in you pick it up and say, “Why in the world did I want this book?” Well, I do that probably more than I should. However the kicker is, 8 out of 10 times I enjoy it. I think forgetting why one was getting an item/book is a good way to allow yourself to not go into something with any preconceived ideas. And Hummingbird Heart by Travis Dandro […]

Two pieces of history around the world

A Place Called Galveston by Andrea Shapiro

Claudia Said Sí!: The Story of Mexico's First Woman President by Deborah Bodin Cohen, Kerry Olitzky and Carlos Vélez Aguilera

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Recently I mentioned to a friend of mine that there are a lot of political titles happening, even in the children’s genres. And most are slanted seriously and obviously in one direction or the other. Therefore, when I find something that is not political, but could fit current events I try to pay attention.  Two of those books are A Place Called Galveston by Andrea Shapiro and illustrator Valerya Milovanova, as well as Claudia Said Sí!: The Story of Mexico’s First Woman President by Deborah […]



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