Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“No, Dad, I’m not interested in getting a Ph.D., I want to make money.”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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I picked this one up based on its very good Cannonball Read reviews and because I needed a book of non-violent true crime for the 2019 Read Harder Challenge. This book did not disappoint. I admit, some how I had missed the entire Theranos story as is broke in 2016, so I can to this narrative entirely unspoiled. I was in for quite the narrative ride. Bad Blood is the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the company she founded at 19 as a Stanford dropout, […]

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419 by Will Ferguson

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Wow, I was not expecting this to be so good.  My prior experiences with Will Ferguson have been through his light, ‘humourous’ travelogues (ie: Beauty Tips From Moosejaw), which I remember being just ok, and not really that funny (I always felt like he was aping Bill Bryson and falling short).  This novel is a big departure from those earlier travelogues, in both subject and tone: it is a tight, character-driven thriller about the fall-out from a Nigerian email scam, nicknamed ‘419’ scams after the […]

Faking It

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Faking It is a rather carefully contrived series of coincidences, but then, most romances are.  I like Jennifer Crusie’s novels because the heroines are rarely 20 year old waifs.  Matilda Goodnight is definitely not a 20 year old waif.  Neither is she cosmetic-ad gorgeous.  She’s struggling to hold together a family and a failed art gallery when a problem from her past announces itself, propelling her from mural painting to art theft in a single evening.  And Davy Dempsey, the brother of Sophie Dempsey (Welcome […]



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