Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Coming of age during the Cuban Revolution

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban by Daniel Miyares

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Cbr17bingo Border (leaving Cuba’s borders is dangerous, entering the US boarding is difficult) While a tense story, How to Say Goodbye in Cuban by Daniel Miyares, is also a delightful one of overcoming the adversity of the times. Though immigration stories are not new, the author makes this based on real events (his own fathers journey from Cuba to the States) fresh. This is a relatively unknown story as I have not seen a lot of stories that were set so much in Cuba with little […]

Be Takei and you know, do stuff!

It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger

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Cbr17bingo White  It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, and Justin Eisinger took me over a week to read. This is not because it was a bad graphic novel, but for three main reasons. First, it is actually on the longer side. Second, because it has heavy subjects it deals with. And finally, the pages can be a bit crowded, making images and text blur together and/or making it hard to follow at times, so I just took my time with […]

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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This memoir had been on my radar for some time, but I just wasn’t sure if I had the emotional wherewithal to read a book about losing your mother to cancer. I had been thinking about it ever since I watched Michelle Zauner’s band, Japanese Breakfast, play on Saturday Night Live (sidebar: I looked it up to see when that performance occurred, and it was in 2022. WHAT EVEN  IS TIME). However, when I had to do a very quick book shop to get something […]

Joe Buck LOVES Christina Applegate

Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, and the Things I'm Not Allowed to Say on TV by Joe Buck

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A lot of people on the internet hate Joe Buck. I’m not one of those people.  Because I grew up in Texas, I am a big Troy Aikman fan.  I like Joe Buck by association. Plus, unless a sports broadcaster never stops talking, I usually have a favorable opinion of them. Ergo, I picked up this audiobook. I was looking for a light, fun listen for my work drives. Lucky Bastard delivered. Joe Buck was born in 1969 to beloved St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck […]

I, a person who does not read memoirs, enjoyed this memoir

Just Kids by Patti Smith

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I had hardly ever listened to Patti Smith’s music before picking up this book, and I hardly ever read memoirs, because I find most of them self-indulgent and boring, sorry, memoirists! But this one was recommended to me as a memoir that was “worth it” and it was available from the library. Good news: it was totally worth it! Even if you, like me, are only passingly aware of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorp’s body of work! Smith’s prose is plainspoken and authentic, which makes […]

No One Else Can Come in and Copy You

Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology by Jorge Goldstein

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Ok, keeping with the gene-theme this summer, I’ll now be briefly turning my attention to gene patents. Jorge Goldstein’s Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology is a great introduction to biological patents in the US (and beyond). It’s also a rather personal narrative; Goldstein entered the field of patent law at a time when biotechnology was experiencing some rapid advances (many of them mentioned in the previous book I reviewed), and he describes his career as like […]



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