Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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How many rules am I to break before you understand that your double standards don’t mean sh*t to me?

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu

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  Originally published in French (in two volumes) as Culottées This was such a great read! I was familiar with Bagieu’s work from back when she had her blog (Ma vie est tout à fait fascinante) but had never read one of her books. Needless to say, I am going to remedy that ASAP. Brazen is a collection of graphic bios of women who refused to live according to the rules imposed by society. Some of them are very famous, some of them have been […]

A Dual Biography that works

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I read Churchill and Orwell because I am a fan of the author, Thomas E. Ricks.  Ricks is best known as a military historian who wrote Fiasco and The Generals, both of which I highly recommend.  This book is a bit of a departure for Ricks but the topic seemed interesting.  Churchill and Orwell is a dual biography of two British men who had similarly parallel lives during WWII-era Great Britain.  I was surprised to find how much the two men had in common, especially […]

A peak into a possible life

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Raina Telgemeier took her childhood struggles with her sister and adapted them into this funny, and at times touching, graphic novel about the joys and angst of sisterhood.  I have two sisters, however with a twelve year age difference between my first sister and myself, and a fourteen year age difference (plus the complexities of autism) between me and my second sister, with the added complication that I moved away from home when they were seven and five respectively, I’ve never had what I consider […]

DISAPPOINTED

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In 2002, I sat in a dark movie theater watching Attack of the Clones. Around the time Yoda goes from wise wielder of the Force to crazy Ninja muppet, I contemplated walking out. I’ve never left a movie theater mid-screening, but on that day I was sorely tempted. Not because Attack of the Clones was the worst movie I’d ever seen, or even the worst movie I’d ever paid to see; I just couldn’t face any more disappointment in that series. What was once a […]

So now I feel like an underachiever

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Lab Girl is one of those books that makes you sit back and wonder what you’ve been doing with your life. It’s not enough that Hope Jahren is an accomplished geobiologist and geochemist, or that she has a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley. It’s not enough that she’s won three Fulbright Awards, or that Popular Science magazine named her one of its “Brilliant 10” scientists in 2006. It’s not enough that in 2016 Time named her one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People.”  With all those accomplishments, you’d think she’d have […]



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