Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Freaks, Geeks, and Automobiles

Role Models by John Waters

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Oooh mama, this is not for the faint of heart! If you aren’t already a fan of John Waters and his coterie of misfits and outsiders then this is NOT the place to start! I first became aware of John Waters through the 1990 film Cry-Baby. It used to be on TV fairly frequently in the late 90s/early Aughts, and I would secretly watch bits and pieces of it when my parents weren’t in the room. I had the “flashback” button on the remote primed and […]

Horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure

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Sometimes you come across a book that is so mind-blowingly good, you immediately go out and purchase every book ever written by the author. The Road to Jonestown was such a book. A huge, fat book that’s more than worth the effort, it tells you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the Reverend Jim Jones, his followers, just how he got hundreds of otherwise intelligent people to cede control of every aspect of their lives, and the sequence of events that led […]

Only the good die young. Evil seems to live forever.

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I’ve gone an read another book that’s made me angry. If there’s one take away message from Chris Johnston and Rosie Jones’ ‘The Family’, it’s that sometimes life is incredibly unjust. Anne Hamilton Byrne, now approaching 100 years old, is currently in palliative care in a nursing home in Melbourne, Australia. She’s only ever been convicted of minor fraud charges, but she’s guilty of so much more. Anne has the honour of being one of Australia’s most notorious cult leaders, serving as the guru and self-professed […]

Growing Up Is Hard Even Without LSD

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This book takes place in the late 1960s, around the summer of love.  I wasn’t around then, so I’m sure that a lot of my ideas of that time are influenced by popular culture.  This isn’t one of those books that glamorizes that era, but seems to exist solely in between the two worlds of structured society and drug-saturated counterculture. The protagonist is Evie, a girl that would be described as “fourteen going on thirty.”  Evie is a bit of an outsider in her own […]

Unless you’re obsessed with Scientology (like I am), read ‘Troublemaker’ instead.

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NB: I received a finished copy of this book as part of a marketing campaign, but that has not affected the content of my review. This book was disappointing and pretty poorly written, but not worthless. There are far better books about Scientology out there, so don’t make this your first stop. But there are a few interesting glimmers here I haven’t read in any other Scientology books, so if the subject matter is something that really gets you going, you may want to check Ruthless out […]

Aliens?

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I will admit I had serious reservations about this book going in. And even into the first three chapters, the only thing that kept going through my head was: But for the most part, this book blew my socks off in the best possible way, and I’m really glad I didn’t DNF it after those first few chapters. “Gods without Men” has a very “Station 11” feel to its structure, and if you liked “Station 11”, I would highly suggest this book. Centered around a […]



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