Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

Together we can be worth more than the sum of our parts

Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

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Sarai Johnson teaches writing and literature courses at Howard and American Universities in the DC Area, and apparently wrote Grown Women, her first novel, in her free time. In my free time I do things like sleep, or sit around and do nothing, or make lists of things I should be doing. Okay okay, I also read the product of other people’s free time. Which bring us full circle to Grown Women, a novel about four generations of women, with the story beginning in 1974 […]

“I’m such a loser in the game of life.”

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

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I could not put this book down. Frank Brady’s Endgame covers the entirety of Bobby Fischer’s life, from his youth to his unglamorous end. Fischer is presented as a magnetic character, simultaneously pulling and repelling friends, opponents, and the public at large. Had Fischer not had his caustic personality, it is hard to imagine how high he could’ve ascended in his mastery of chess. However, he did have a caustic personality, as well as a hateful belief system, and a fascination with younger women. Outside of […]

“What is the correct collective noun for us..? Maybe ‘a repugnance of twats’ is most apt?”

The Twat Files by Dawn French

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I am a big fan of British humor, whether on TV, film or the page. While I haven’t seen a lot of the French-Saunders comedy team’s sketch work, I know who they are. I am more familiar with Jennifer Saunders due to Ab Fab, but I was aware that Dawn French had a series called The Vicar of Dibley and I recognized her as “The Fat Lady” in the HP movie franchise. French has written several books, and this latest one The Twat Files got […]

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go”

Elvis and Me (1985) by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon

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Content note for book and review: Grooming, addiction, domestic violence So I’ve recently got into writer/comedian/actress Chelsea Devantez‘s podcast Glamorous Trash, which does deep dives into celebrity memoir and generally unpacking celebrity myth making and narratives in a funny, thoughtful, sometimes poignant, and very incisive and sympathetic way. I listened to the episodes about the memoirs I’d read, and then ordered a bunch more that looked interesting to read before listening to their episodes. (Do other people approach podcasts like book series/binge-watching, whereby they listen […]

Men are naturally hot and dry and women are naturally cold and damp. Guess which is good?

The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Janega

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Accessibly written history on how medieval society viewed women and how they viewed themselves. Spoiler alert – the “natural” woman is straight up the opposite of what society thinks is “natural” now. I’ve recently fallen down a Youtube rabbit hole on History Hit. I am finding it somewhat reassuring to learn about other times in history that have dealt with seemingly insurmountable issues that were, eventually, surmounted. So when I learned that one of their historians wrote the history of medieval women? Girl, I ran […]



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