Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Or just another lost angel, city of night”

L. A. Women (2025) by Ella Berman

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I picked this book up because I liked the font, and the colours, and I’m fascinated by Los Angeles (where, of course, I’ve never been), and its foggy shadows and neon gleam: the films, the music, the messy myths and sprawling stories. The story here is a little Natalie Beach/Caroline Calloway if they lived in the 1960s-1970s, haunting Laurel Canyon instead of Cambridge and New York. Berman’s story centres on Gala and Lane, the friend with the glitter, the friend in the shadows, and the […]

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

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Raoul Duke and his attorney go on a mad, drug-fueled tear through late 1960s Las Vegas, where they haphazardly cover a desert motorcycle race and attend a police convention. The whole time I was reading this book I could not help but keep thinking about how very annoyed I would be if I were on this trip with Duke & the Doc. Not that anyone I know’s ever gone on so wild a tear, but I could certainly see the echoes of herding around friends […]

Jack, in his dark camps, saw Ennis as a night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.

Brokeback Mountain by E. Annie Proulx

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Going up, the day was fine but the trail deep-drifted and slopping wet at the margins. They left it to wind through a slashy cut, leading the horses through brittle branchwood, Jack, the same eagle feather in his old hat, lifting his head in the heated noon to take the air scented with resinous lodgepole, the dry needle duff and hot rock, bitter juniper crushed beneath the horses’ hooves. Ennis, weather-eyed, looked west for the heated cumulus that might come up on such a day […]

Not the right chemistry for me

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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Bingo 12: School Some of the more significant moments especially towards the beginning of Lessons in Chemistry, as well as some later generally consistent episodes related to school work and learning put this one in the School spot. It’s no secret that being female in academia has been a challenge for a significant part of history, and Lessons in Chemistry starts with the worst parts of the 1950s-1960s horrific treatment of women in higher education (seriously, there should be a CW for the assault scene). […]

“From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes / I waited ages to see you there”

Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) by Dorothy Baker

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I was going to make a few brief notes about this and then add this to my review roundup of the Monica Heisey and Curtis Sittenfeld books–and they sort of make a good triptych of more or less complicated women by women writers. But I ended up rambling a bit more about this one, and indeed, Cassandra of Cassandra at the Wedding is not so much complicated, or even messy, but a full on crucible of chaos and doubt and solipsism in human form, who […]

“Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books recommended by friends Elizabeth Zott is a chemist struggling to be taken seriously by her male colleagues at a lab in the 1960s. She never completed her degree because her academic advisor raped her, but her lack of degree in no way means she’s not intelligent. Despite her brilliant mind, her male co-workers either treat her as nothing more than a lab assistant or steal her research and present it as their own. The one exception to this is Calvin Evans, […]



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