Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The CBR12 Book Bingo Reading Challenge Has Begun—Get the Official Card and Play through October 31!

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Love Drives Out Fear

Beyond Awkward Side Hugs: Living as Christian Brothers and Sisters in a Sex-Crazed World by Bronwyn Lea

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When I was newly married one of my local churches gave a great series of sermons about marriage. There was helpful advice about mutual service and building lives and support systems together. In retrospect, one piece advice always bothered me, though. It was a variation on The Billy Graham Rule. Billy Graham famously wouldn’t be alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife, in an effort to flee from any hint of sexual immorality, I suppose. (He also made his finances reviewable by others to […]

The Troubles

Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Read as part of cbr12 bingo: Pandemic! I’ve wanted to read this one for a bit and it doesn’t really fit in any other category. Few books have had the kind of hype that Say Nothing has been getting the last 12-18 months. It wound up on dozens of “Best Of” lists in 2019. It was recommended by Barack Obama. Friends who read it gushed about it. Given that’s a history tale (yes) about a subject I know little about but am curious of (uh-huh), I knew […]

Beyond Self-Acceptance

The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor

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BINGO: Violet (I mean, she’s on a bed of ACTUAL VIOLETS) Best for: Those open to reconsidering the ways they view themselves and others. In a nutshell: Author Sonya Renee Taylor offers up the idea that society’s ills are based on hatred of bodies that deviate from ‘the norm,’ and that by moving beyond self-acceptance to self-love, we will be able to create “a world that works for every body.” Worth quoting: “Our societies have defined what is considered a ‘normal’ body and have assigned […]

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.

Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

A Place in the Country by WG Sebald

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The Rings of Saturn So this one feels to me less of a novel than Austerlitz did, which already stretches my sense of what is a novel. We begin with Sebald (and normally I am not one to presume an unnamed narrator is the author, especially in novels, and in the case of Sophie’s Choice even when the narrator IS the novelist, by name, but here we even get a picture of Sebald in the text!), walking through the county of Suffolk, and his first stop along the […]

Major Insights: People on the Internet Are Racist, Like Porn, and Lie on Social Media

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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CBR12 BINGO: How-To I work in Marketing, and these days it’s all about data. How are you going to measure it? What does success look like? These are the mundane questions I have to answer every day, so reading this book was a bit like work. But, it fits a BINGO square, so I benefitted in the end. Also, enough interesting nuggets are included to make it mildly interesting. The main takeaway is that asking people to complete surveys is pretty pointless, because people lie […]



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