On this Mother’s Day, we’ve made our first donation of CBR11 to the American Cancer Society in memory of AlabamaPink. Thanks to generous contributions from people like you, ad revenue from this site, profits from our merchandise on RedBubble and earnings from our Amazon affiliate links, we’ve been able to give $200 today. Amanda “AlabamaPink” Amos was one of the original “Eloquents” at the pop-culture website, Pajiba, and her challenge with Brian Prisco formed the first Cannonball Read. Since she lost her battle with leukemia, AlabamaPink has […]
Evolution is a fickle bitch
I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro
I set out to learn about Tig Notaro when she appeared on Star Trek: Discovery as the dry, hyper-confident engineer Jet Reno. I love this character so much that I went down the Tig Notaro rabbit hole and discovered she does not disappoint, and is possibly the only person worthy of depicting Jet Reno. I chose to do the audiobook version of her memoir, in part because I love her dry-Daria like delivery and wish I could truly perfect my like-I-give-a-fuck-about-emoting-monotone like she has. If […]
Just when you thought cancer couldn’t suck any more than it already does
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle
Barbara K. Lipska had already survived two encounters with the dreaded “C” disease when weird things started happening to her brain. In 2009 she fought off breast cancer, undergoing a mastectomy of her left breast, and then, in 2012, she defeated melanoma, or so she thought. That’s the trouble with cancer; you’re never really “cured.” There’s always the chance that it can metastasize somewhere else in your body. For Lipska, a neuroscientist who specializes in studying mental illness, the disease came roaring back in the […]
Love can overcome any obstacle
This is my SHINY SHINY SHINY book While I really enjoyed Echo’s Sister by Paul Moiser, the writing is in a “debut author” style (meaning it can be a little “unsmooth” at times) even though this is his second book. It is also overly optimistic and “sweet” while dealing with a tough subject. With all that said, it is aimed perfectly at the audience of ages (high reader or concept understanding) 8 or 9-year-old up to about 10 years old. However, a slightly older […]
A Seemingly Moderate Take on Terminal Illness
Best for: People who enjoy memoirs such as When Breath Becomes Air. In a nutshell: Now-deceased writer Nina Riggs documents her illness from diagnosis onward. Line that sticks with me: “These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: ‘I love you.’ Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?” Why I chose it: Memoir + death = A Lollygagger staple. Review: Author Nina Riggs gives us a gift with this book, in that it isn’t […]
Finally, an unreliable narrator who isn’t horrible
I’ve written fairly extensively about how much I dislike unreliable narrators, and how books written to damage the psyche are, I think, grotesque and antithetical to everything I want in a book. The narrator here is struggling through a fairly difficult time in her life, and therefore can’t always be relied on to objectively perceive her reality – but I think it’s handled in a way that is fair to the characters, and it’s done in service to the story, not as some cheap ploy […]
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