Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sometimes YouTube leads to books!

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? by Caitlin Doughty

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Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? By Caitlin Doughty Caitlin Doughty is a mortician/funeral home director, and a YouTube content creator (but not the bad kind.)  She posts videos about death – her channel is called “Ask a Mortician.”  I’m not sure how the YouTube algorithm got me there, but one of Caitlin Doughty’s videos popped up on my recommended video list one day, and so I watched it.  And then I proceeded to binge watch most of her videos that weekend.  (That’s a LOT […]

Redeemable trust fund kids

The Nest by Cynthia d'Aprix Sweeney

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I have had this mint green brick sitting on my shelf for years- passed on by a friend, I knew that it was a bestseller, likely to be turned into a movie or tv show, and for some reason it always felt like something I ‘should’ read rather than what I wanted to read. Reader, I was wrong! The Nest is a story about the four adult Plumb siblings who are months away from inheriting a reasonably-sized trust fund when a self-made disaster strikes: Leo, […]

Is this the final Grishaverse book? I hope not

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Fauna (dragon, wolf, falcon and fox on the cover) In this second part of the King of Scars duology, the stakes are ridiculously high, pretty much as soon as we start off. The book starts pretty much immediately after the end of King of Scars, and if you’re not caught up with all the books in the Grishaverse so far, this review will probably spoil things for you. Continue at your own risk. Nikolai Lantsov has made some peace with the […]

Aquatic Reveries

Eloquence of the Sardine: Extraordinary Encounters Beneath the Sea by Bill François

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Since I have only recently read Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, this book immediately reminded me of it. Both books are collections of often highly personal tales that are mostly concerned with animal life, and are written with an impressive reverence for and a deep understanding of the natural world. Where Macdonald looks to the birds in the sky and occasionally the animals roaming the land, however, physicist Bill François is solely interested in the creatures populating the more mysterious world of the oceans. It starts […]

Respect the Animal, Dammit.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

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Bingo square, Fauna I spent a week in Central Florida (pre-Disney era) one summer, many decades back, when I was 9 years old.  It was memorable.  From the gators roaming the backyards in the evening, to the constant state of sogginess I was in, even as a child, to the amazing show at Weeki Wachee wherein young women with amazing breath-holding skills played at being mermaids in a giant tank.  All this is to say that this book could only have been written about that […]

Animal, animal!

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth

Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

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CBR13Bingo – Fauna Both of these fit the category, so I will link them together.   Barn 8 – 3/5 Stars We get a lot of exposition upfront with this book. Our protagonist runs away from her New York life when she’s 15 to meet her estranged, and only recently discovered father in Iowa. Turns out, he’s nothing special. She’s been living with her mom in New York, a woman who left Iowa at 19 while pregnant and had to make it on her own. […]



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