Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Not all rainbows in these celebrity memoirs

We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union

Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling (with Great Hair) by Rosie Perez

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I read We’re Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union for my last in-person Mocha Girls Read meeting in March. This memoir is a collection of moments that are mostly linear with some flashbacks. Unlike Becoming, the chapters are not as detailed about her early childhood. The book is all about keeping it real and reflecting on her past with levity. We learn about her family and how she at a young age she looked after herself. With no supervision, Gabrielle got up to some […]

“We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run” (double Bingo)

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

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#CBR12 Bingo: Music   Official book description: In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began.   Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.   He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid […]

fun fact: name dropping Joan Didion no less than 45 times in your 270 page book does not make you Joan Didion

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

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You know that dream where you realize that you have been in assigned to a class for an entire semester, but you have never once attended the class? You “wake up” on the day that your final is due and panic, then cobble together whatever previous assignments that you have scattered about that might be able to pass for whatever you were supposed to do in that class? I am fairly sure that’s what happened to Alice Bolin when she woke up one day, book […]

“I don’t really have any dreams beyond comfortable pants and unlimited sparkling water” (Bingo)

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

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#CBR11 Bingo: The Collection (Could also work for True Story, Cannonballer Says, Own Voices and Rainbow Flag) Official book description: Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when life is a dumpster fire. With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life., “bitches gotta eat” blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette–she’s “35-ish, but could easily […]

A surprisingly educational celebrity autobiography

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

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In this very engaging autobiography, Trevor Noah opens up about growing up in South Africa, born from a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when this was literally a crime punishable with several years in prison. The Apartheid regime ended while Noah was still young, but his childhood was still deeply affected by the fact that he was a mixed race child in a society where the races were not supposed to mix at all, to the point where his […]

A really boring review about a really funny book.

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Tina Fey, man. What even is there to say? It’s her memoir. It’s really, really weird that I picked it up at all because there’s not much on this planet that I’m less interested in than celebrity memoirs. I’m an ISTJ, I’m interested in a lot of things, but not that. I reluctantly read Leah Remini’s book Troublemaker because I was curious about Scientology and it seemed like an accessible book about it, but read the parts about her life and career and behind the […]



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