Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Or just another lost angel, city of night”

L. A. Women (2025) by Ella Berman

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I picked this book up because I liked the font, and the colours, and I’m fascinated by Los Angeles (where, of course, I’ve never been), and its foggy shadows and neon gleam: the films, the music, the messy myths and sprawling stories. The story here is a little Natalie Beach/Caroline Calloway if they lived in the 1960s-1970s, haunting Laurel Canyon instead of Cambridge and New York. Berman’s story centres on Gala and Lane, the friend with the glitter, the friend in the shadows, and the […]

“A friend in need is a friend indeed, a friend who bleeds is better”

Workhorse (2025) by Caroline Palmer

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It’s been a weird year–a lot of work stress, some painful if not acute health stuff,  a lot of messy emotional knots, or perhaps unraveling, a lot of therapy, and reader’s block. But in the last days of the dying year, I did two things I have not done for a long time, one of which was stay up most of the night to finish a book. And that book was Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse, which I picked up in hardback on Christmas Eve because I […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

“What must it be like to grow up that beautiful / with your hair falling into place like dominoes”

Gwyneth: The Biography (2025) by Amy Odell

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This is for bingo square ‘favourite’, partly because celebrity memoir/biography is one of my favourite genres, but also because Gwyneth Paltrow has, in one way or another, been the favourite her whole life–favoured of fate and fortune via her parents, acclaimed actress Blythe Danner and producer Bruce Paltrow, cynosure of critics, muse for Calvin Klein and Anna Wintour, tabloid and arty celebrity scene It Girl, Academy darling for her Oscar win at 26 for Shakespeare in Love (1998)—and more chillingly, for a while, as journalist […]

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

“They’re the ones who’ll hate you / When you think you’ve got the world all sussed out”

Assassin's Apprentice (1995) by Robin Hobb

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He goes by ‘Boy’ for his first years, then ‘Fitz’ and ‘Bastard’, then FitzChivalry Farseer, illegitimate son of Chivalry Farseer, son of the enigmatic King Shrewd. This is for the Bingo Family square; Fitz has a family, a name, a legacy–but he never knew his own father, his grandfather buys his loyalty rather than offering him affection, and one of his uncles wants him humiliated at best and dead at worst. I read Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy when I was a teen with the time […]



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