Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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OhWeGone

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: cult. There is a commune at the center of this book that may-or-may-not be a cult. You’ll have to read to find out! An interesting book that’s tough to rate but I’m glad I read it. Also glad for Book Bingos, Reading and Library Challenges that get me to get stuff off of my shelves that would otherwise sit there for years. Shea Ernshaw has real talent. I was drawn into the world she wrote; being quite impressed with […]

Cults, Sex, and Vegetarian Recipes

Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat ― An American History by Christina Ward

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I loved this book, which is an odd thing to say because it took me weeks to finish it. It is dense. And the crazy stuff that people called “religion” required more than a few re-reads. On Rosicrucianism Paschal Beverly Randolph saw sex as a powerful energy that could be controlled and sublimated into magical works. As he explored sex magic and the power of the Will, he came to odds with Madame Blavatsky who, as others have testified, tried to kill him with her […]

things that weren’t yours to lose

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

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I felt the air being knocked out of my chest on more than one occasion while sinking into Arcadia. Lauren Groff’s prose is sparse and beautiful, and there’s no way for me to accurately describe it without further muddying it into oblivion. She tells only what needs to be told; moments are fleeting, endings are organic, and jumps through time are poignant and crushing. I felt the ache of nostalgia for things that I have never experienced. I felt long-gone youthful optimism harden and calcify into […]

It’s all about the girls

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On the surface, The Girls, by Emma Cline, appears to be about a Manson-like figure in Northern California in the 1960s. The leader of a small, communal living group, Russell taught his small group of followers “to discover a path to truth, how to free their real selves from where it was coiled inside them.” The group consists mostly of women, and mostly of young women, who felt that being around Russell was “like a natural high… Like the sun or something. That big and […]



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