Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I fail to can (CBR12Bingo: Uncannon)

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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When I was a wee pretentious lass (as opposed to a pretentious woman who needs to lose ten pounds) I decided to see how much I could communicate by speaking in Simpsons quotes and Radiohead lyrics. It was precisely as awful as it sounds, and I want reach through the fabric of space time to smack teenage Octothorp upside the head. This reads QUITE a bit like that, but with lots of bible stuff in between, so it’s more or less the exact worst book […]

“I often described my sudden shift in self-awareness as feeling as if a demon had entered my room in the middle of the night, startled me awake by whispering, ‘What if you were a man, sort of?’ into my ear, then slithered out the window before I could ask any follow-up questions.”

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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This would honestly be five stars except for a handful of essays/interludes that were too experimental and obscure for me to get anything out of them. I’m going to keep this review short and sweet for a couple of reasons, the first being that the time for me to have said something detailed, thoughtful, and incisive about it would have been back in late April when I first finished it. That time has now long passed. The second reason being that I’m not sure I […]

It was nine thirty on Christmas Eve.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Time and Tide by Frank Conroy

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

Inside Stories by Ben H Winters

The Dark Web by Geoff White

Latin History for Morons by John Leguizamo

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgard

This Land is Their Land by Barbara Ehrenreich

Dr Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

Texts from Jane Eyre by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Tom Sawyer Detective by Mark Twain

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Here’s a whole bunch of kind of (Sorry) short reviews for short books! Pandemic reading!!!     The Woman in Black – 3/5 Stars I still think it remains a little silly that this movie had Daniel Radcliffe in it. He was too fresh off of Harry Potter and hadn’t yet made his real transition into adult movies. I think his show “The Young Doctor’s Notebook” was a more successful vehicle for him as it placed him in a transitional role. Anyway, I mention all […]

I’m probably the only one.

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Y’all I spent so much time at The Toast! I loved, loved, loved it. Enough that I go back and read my favourite posts over and over again—especially the art history ones, like this one. So, I’m just gonna say it. I did not like The Merry Spinster very much. Oooof, that hurt. This book was on everyone’s radar, and every review has praised its inventiveness. I get it. But it was fine. It was just, fine. I didn’t finish it all that long ago, but I honestly […]

My first memory is of vomiting upon contact with the ginger-drenched air.

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I wasn’t initially sure if I was liking this or not liking this book. The challenge is that like a lot of books written from an immigrant perspective there’s a kind of tendency to write into the novel a sense of totalizing voice, as if this will be the only book ever written about the experiences of, in this case, Ethiopian, immigrants. This book does challenge that structure to some extent by the end, especially given that this book is as much a geopolitical thriller […]

You’ve really got a hold on me

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As I have mentioned before, fairy tales were my jam when I was younger. I also love some good remixes — musical or cultural — and humor, so things like Texts from Jane Eyre were absolutely delightful to me. When I heard that Daniel Mallory Ortberg was putting out a book of retold fairy tails (as Mallory Ortberg), I immediately put in a pre-order. In my haste and my assumptions based on the humor of Ortberg’s other work, having missed the “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” […]



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