Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there.”

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese

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This was a Christmas present from last year due to my interest in Frank Sinatra and other complicated mid-century men with bad tempers. It then sat for a while until I re-entered my interest phase, which only apparently took about a year. The titular essay is extremely well known as one of the main pieces of “New Journalism” and is hugely influential on celebrity profiles to this day. I used to get Esquire for many years and the profiles all sound like this. It was […]

“the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities”

The Best American Travel Writing 2020 by Jason Wilson (editor)

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One of this year’s Read Harder tasks was to read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice. I had a couple ideas and went perusing through my library catalog to see what I could come up with. And then I saw The Best American Travel Writing 2020 edited by Jason Wilson and the absurdity of these pandemic years meant that this one won out. Consider me intrigued to know what won out in a year that […]

Personal Essays on Horror, from a Queer Angle

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese (editor)

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When I saw that It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror came out this month I headed immediately to my library catalog to request it and then proceeded to consume it over three evenings. By and large this is an excellent collection of essays featuring queer authors of many stripes taking a movie, sometimes two, and either pulling them apart to discuss representation, or explain why they became fixated on a certain film, or how a film can help them process part of […]

An excellent anthology of disabled authors from a variety of perspectives.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century by ed. Alice Wong

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This was a solid collection of essays from voices rarely heard in publishing, or elsewhere. Ableism is baked into our culture. I read this for Read Harder this year, and this is why I like participating in that challenge every year, because there are always a couple books I probably would never have read otherwise, and this is one of those. Like most essay collections, there are essays that are stronger than others. The standouts for me were the very first essay by Harriet McBryde […]

Year of Penny? EXCUSE ME, LIFE of Penny!

The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson

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5/26 UPDATE: if you are curious and want to check out an excerpt, you can do so HERE! Do you miss Happy Endings? If you have seen the show, then the answer is obviously YES SO MUCH OH MY GOODNESS PLEASE COME BACK! If you have not seen the show, then what are you doing? Get out of here and inject all three seasons directly into your eyeballs before returning! Several days ago, the unfortunately canceled Happy Endings turned 10. 10! It seems like just yesterday, Alex […]

yes, but…maybe she’ll make an exception and WE can meet?

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

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My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all. First of all: same. Second: you must read this collection. Second–and-a-half: by read I mean listen. Samantha […]



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