Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“My life will be the best illustration of all my work.”

Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller by Jackie Wullschläger

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I love Hans Christian Andersen. I love his deranged and depressing stories. Three of my favorite fairytales are his, and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage for my F*cked Up Fairy Tales from poking fun at him. But he is the first person on my list of “Dead or Alive People I’d Like at My Dinner Party.” Despite this, it took me approximately one thousand years to get around to reading the well-received biography I purchased a while back, Hans Christian Andersen: the Life of […]

The Audacity of Princes

The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone

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Joanna I, Queen of Naples, is best known today for having stood trial for the murder of her husband during the height of the bubonic plague, but she faced many other challenges during her thirty-year-long reign. The whole time I was listening to this audiobook, I kept marveling at the absolute audacity of the royal men of this era, who over the decades launched a number of invasions and plots in an attempt to claim Naples for themselves. A woman on the throne seemed to […]

“What’s the difference between a private library and a book hoarder?” “Feces.”

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein

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I’m a bit late jumping on the train with regards to this one. I think I’ve had a copy of this sitting on my ebook reader for years… and just never opened it up. Then, forgetting about my ebook, I then purchased the audiobook. Oops. Such a shame though; The Trauma Cleaner is one of those rare gems of a biography where a truly talented author gets a chance  to tackle a truly fascinating subject. The Trauma Cleaner is also unusual in that the subject, […]

Reasons why this is a cookbook not for me, at least not at this time

Good Things by Samin Nosrat

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Sometimes it’s pretty clear when a book is probably just fine, but maybe not for you, or at least you right now. Good Things by Samin Nosrat has some good things going for it. It’s got a lot of parts where there ar basically sets of theme and variation on a recipe or ingredient which can be nice when you’ve got a lot of something but don’t want to get bored. The premise of focusing on kind of simple pleasures is also something I can […]

The Power of Audacity

The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth

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Victoria Woodhull started life being paraded around as a child psychic by her conman father and marrying an alcoholic twice her age, but through a lot of work, luck, and audacity, she lived many lives as a stockbroker, a newspaper editor, a suffragette, the first female presidential candidate, and much more. Victoria Woodhull is one of those interesting American characters that’s been popping up in books I’ve read set in the Gilded Age for several years. She was eccentric and scrappy, but in many ways […]

“A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: “I have been thrown into a far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.”

The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence by Anita Anand

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A Indian freedom fighter waited more than two decades to exact revenge for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre which was ordered by the British Raj – but the story is more complicated and less cinematic than it has been often depicted since. At the start of this book, the author notes that as the descendent of Indians, she had to set aside her natural aversion to the British Raj and admiration for Udham Singh to tell the story in as unbiased a way as she could. […]



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