My first Cannonball, hooray! Housebroken is another collection of humor essays from Laurie Notaro. Throughout the years I’ve read all of her books. Some are hilarious, some are so-so. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Housebroken quickly became one of my favorites of hers. I found myself laughing out loud multiple times. Notaro’s essays usually focus on domestic issues with her husband or family, or sometimes on the strange people she encounters in her day-to-day life (she now lives in Eugene, Oregon, which it […]
The Hans Christian Anderson classic is updated and spun into a Christmas story
With Matchless I’m at review 52! CANNONBALL! I don’t expect to do this again, I had to sacrifice longer novels for shorter ones to meet the goal and stretch with some graphic novels at the end but I’m satisfied with my reviews and enjoyed the challenge of pushing myself to stay on a reading and writing schedule. Apologies to my work for the countless lunch hours (and sometimes beyond) spent writing these up. On to review 52! Matchless began its life a spoken word performance […]
Ridiculous…But Fun Ridiculousness
Cannonball! Were you a fan of the Christopher Pike books where highly sociopathic and/or psychopathic teenagers attempted to ruin the lives of others for strange reasons? I loved those books. I guarantee that they are pure crap now (in fact, one cannonballer had been doing reviews and had me remembering them all in their crappy glory) but that’s pretty much what Liars Inc. is like. It’s junk food, you know that it’s not really a good book but it was FANTASTIC to read because […]
The movie is better.
How often can you say you liked the movie better with a straight face? Not often. Here’s what the movie has going for it: 1. It’s fun and watchable. 2. It has pretty people in it. 3. Horrible things happen to those pretty people. 4. It takes parts of this book and ignores the rest. 5. It completely subverts the pro-military message of the book into a satire. 6. It has Neil Patrick Harris in it as a psychic. 7. It’s cheesy and violent and tries […]
(Even if your heart is broken and attacking you, you’re still not better off without it.)
As we approach Thanksgiving here in the U.S. I’m reminded of the things I’m thankful for, and in the last several years Cannonball Read is one of the things I am extremely thankful for. It’s helped reignite my love of reading, its introduced me to a group of people who also love to be bookish readers and talk about what they’re reading and why it’s affecting them the way it is. And its helped pull me outside of myself in my real life as whole […]
Grief and family and friendship and a ghostly alligator. Also – Cannonball!
Disclaimer! I got a free ARC of this through NetGalley. I have not been promised anything in return for this review, although if people wanted to start bribing me to read their books, that would be ok too. Kate Pheris has been a widow for a year, and has been sleep-walking through her life since her husband Matt died. Now her house has been sold, her and her daughter’s things are all packed and they’re all set to move in with her mother-in-law, who has all […]