Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Work reading thunderdome

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Radical Candour by Kim Scott

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Battle of the ‘read it for work’ books! First round: the credentials. Liz Wiseman was the Vice President of Human Resources Development at the tech giant Oracle, where she created Oracle University- seems like good background and skills for teaching the rest of us some things about leadership. Kim Scott worked at Apple and Google, including as part of the ‘Apple faculty’, and also coached CEOs at Twitter, Dropbox and some other tech companies. She also name drops Sheryl Sandberg. So far seems like an […]

Heartbreaking work on staggering loss

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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Joan Didion passed away in late December, 2021, which made the beginning of 2022 feel like the right time to read arguably her most famous book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir on grief. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, John Dunne, returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana, in the hospital, where she was suffering from severe pneumonia. They fell into their usual evening pattern- starting the fire, making dinner- when John had a heart […]

A Year in the Life

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

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CBR Bingo – Funky, because like most Moshfegh novels this book isn’t afraid to really get into the funk of being a human. I am still trying to decide how much I actually like Moshfegh’s novels. I really enjoy her WRITING, and her books keep me interested the whole time, which I suppose are two signs that I really like her. She’s not at all squeamish about human bodies, and there’s something sort of refreshing in that. And yet, there are images in her novels […]

A trauma victim finds her strength

Medusa by Jessie Burton

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Cbr14bingo Shadow Medusa lives in a cave, hides in the shadows from Perseus and is a shadow of herself because of what happened to her. This book would fit for the snake or monster squares as well. This YA novel (for 9th grade and older) with beautiful illustrations by Olivia Lomenech Gill, reimagines the myth of Medusa, a woman with snakes for hair whose glance could turn men to stone. In the original myth, Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena’s temple, causing Athena to punish Medusa […]

August 2022 Leftovers

Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Pete Solotaroff

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland As into a Dynasty and Changed Baseball Forever by Nancy Finley

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Ms. Tree, Volume 1 by Max Alan Collins

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Some extra books I read in August. What a miserably hot month… Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood**** Less a conventional biopic on The Mick and more a look at his life vis-a-vis his legend and the backdrop of postwar America. Not as thorough as I would’ve liked but still riveting given how Jane Leavy presents her subject.   Greenwich Park*** Again glad I slept on my review. I really liked how this started but after a while, it morphed into […]

“Sure, everything is ending. But not yet.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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CBR Bingo – Time (Bingo!) Both because this books plays a bit with timelines, and because I read The Candy House out of the order of publication (which I think was mostly fine). Having read The Candy House, I was sort of prepared for the style of this novel – a series of chapters that are interrelated, working together to tell a larger story (with a huge cast of characters). I know that some consistent complaints about these books revolve around the fact that there are […]



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