Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“Maybe I never needed to change in order to justify my existence”

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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CBR18Bingo: Summer, because it was the first book I finished this summer. Meditations for Mortals opens with the line, “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out.” Rather than offering a system guaranteed to optimize your life and change you into the ideal version of yourself, the book’s stated goal is to teach you how to live a meaningful life in the messy imperfection of reality. I picked it up after seeing […]

“Being duped contaminates your entire sense of self.”

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

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For full disclosure (which feels extra important when discussing a book about deception) I did not finish this book. I made it to the halfway point and realized that the structure of the book wasn’t working for me, and I didn’t want to pick it back up. So, I didn’t.   Now, with that in mind, the reason I believe I felt that way was the way Abby Ellin blended the personal narrative of her lived experience being engaged to a con man with the research about deception through double lives and false identities was not landing for me. I would imagine that Ellin hoped by keeping her own […]

I loved this book

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

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I saw Raising Hare (2025) on so many different lists at the end of the year, but I was a little resistant. All I knew was that a woman raised a baby hare and wrote a book about it. I love animals, so you’d think I’d jump at a chance to read more about them. However, I’m not a big fan of turning wild animals into pets, and I feared that Raising Hare would be some kind of Disney-fied rendition of nature. Fortunately, I was wrong. I listened to Raising […]

Voted “The Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong” in 1947 – and He Was!

Vagabond: A Memoir by Tim Curry

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cbr17bingo Card – Clown (Because, c’mon, Pennywise!) There are two Muppet movies that will always make me squee, because of their human costars.  The first is Christmas Carol with Michael Caine, and the second is Treasure Island with Tim Curry.  (An astute critic remarked that the first one works because Caine never treats his costars as anything other than human, while the second succeeds because Curry is a Muppet).  If there is a comic villain needed, Curry is your man.  What I had no idea […]

A Dictionary Into Which a Left-Handed Monkey Wrench Has Been Thrown

The Left Handed Dictionary by Leonard Louis Levinson

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Thursday July 30 is “Paperback Book Day,” celebrating the first books published in paperback by Penguin Publishing Co. back in 1835. Many years ago (but not as far back as that) when I was in 8th grade, I received this gem of a paperback from the assistant principal of my middle school. The Left Handed Dictionary is a slim little volume filled with quotations and organized in dictionary format. The cover descriptions say it comprises: 5,000 hip definitions that once tripped gaily off the slightly forked […]

I paid for it… kinda

Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman

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CBR18 Bingo – Steal: When I saw the bingo card, I thought it would be funny if I reviewed Steal This Book. Then I realized I never read it. So I did. To be clear, the book does explicitly endorse stealing. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral. Steal This Book was written by Abbie Hoffman, with co-conspirator Izak Haber and Bert Cohen as accessory after […]



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