Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“At last we meet again for the first time, for the last time.”

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

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All I’ve got in my head right now is that line from Spaceballs (see title of this review). I say that because every year I read a handful of books that I am just absolutely at a loss for how to review. This is my first one of 2022! I just want to say la la la la la and maybe read it again, but I’m expected instead to verbalize my thoughts about a book that covered so much and was so good and so […]

Toxic Air

the_atmospherians by Isle McElroy

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 At times, this seems like a somewhat simple book about a disgraced influencer who starts a cult with her childhood best friend. When you step away from it and look at the balancing act McElroy pulled off though, you realize they pulled off the ultimate achievement of making something difficult look easy. McElroy throws so many balls in the air and keeps juggling, successfully introducing challenging and difficult elements to make this tight-rope walk of a book work. The book begins with Sasha, a disgraced […]

When something feels ethically wrong language is a good place to look for clues to why.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

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Amanda Montell is a language scholar who takes her readers on a trip through social history using linguistics. I read and enjoyed Montell’s Wordslut two years ago, and in her second book, Cultish, Montell is interested in examining the edges of our culture that can exhibit some unhealthy habits by examining the way language is used in them, and that is the kind of thing I am going to sign up for every time.   Utilizing both storytelling and independent research Montell exposes the linguistic elements that make a wide spectrum of […]

If you like reading about cults, you’ll love Fog Island

Fog Island by Mariette Lindstein

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I’m using this for my “New Series” bingo square. This is the first in a planned trilogy of novels about “the cult on Fog Island.”  Originally written in Swedish, this novel takes place on an island off the mainland of Sweden where an idealistic group of people adhere to the principles of Via Terra – a way of living that returns to the earth. Sofia is a young woman who is searching for something, and she finds it at a lecture about Via Terra by […]

I stole the images from online, but all thoughts and opinions are mine

Talking to Strangers: A Memoir of My Escape from a Cult by Marianne Boucher

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One thing I like about working at a bookstore is you never know what you will find. And when circumstances had me finding Talking to Strangers: A Memoir of My Escape from a Cult my first thought was (as I only saw Talking to Strangers), “So?” But then I looked at the cover and thought, “Well that’s interesting. Let’s give Marianne Boucher more of a look-at later.” I left it, face up on my desk, and a nosy coworker looked at it, “What’s this…. oh! […]

“‘Willfully withholding. Unnecessarily inaccessible. Not delivering on its premise.'”

Bunny by Mona Awad

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You know those moments when you’re battling a fever, you’re in and out of fitful sleep, and you’re not entirely sure what is real and what is imagined? Those fever tinged experiences that you just want to be over but time stretches way beyond what it should be allowed to stretch? That was what reading Bunny was like. Samantha is a Narrative Arts graduate student at Warren, a prestigious university known for its experimental approach to both pedagogy and writing style it tries to pull out […]



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