Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Love me some historical messy bishes

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

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Are you one of those people who likes to read the book before seeing the movie?  I am.  So when I found out (around 3-4 years late) that there was a White Queen mini-series, I was excited to jump in.  I had also just lost my job and I was really looking for a book to serve as a screen saver for the brain; something that would entertain me but wouldn’t test me.  A historical family drama definitely hit the spot. Philippa Gregory’s collected works […]

The Americas Deserved Better Than Guns, Germs, and Steel

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

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After watching John Leguizamo’s Netflix special Latin History for Morons, I felt a duty to learn more about the Hemisphere in which I live. I started with Mr. Leguizamo’s strongest recommendation: 1491, a 560-page tome with multiple appendices. The author isn’t a historian or archaeologist but a journalist who synthesizes all manner of information and makes it accessible.  The result is so compelling, so dense and riddled with shocks big and small that I suspended my usual speed-reading. Unexamined assumptions that I wasn’t even aware […]

“The first rule is don’t fall in love”…. guess what happens??

How To Stop Time by Matt Haig

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I picked this up this afternoon as a cozy read during a snow day where work is cancelled and everyone is snowed in.   How To Stop Time is about Tom, a man who had a medical condition that causes him to age incredibly slowly. He’s not immortal, this isn’t played off as sci-fi or fantasy. He will eventually age and die, but in the meantime he is 439 years old and appears to be 41. The story takes us back and forth between present […]

Coffee Reading Lite

The Monk of Mokha by David Eggers

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As my CBR handle suggests, I like coffee shops, both for the lattes and the atmosphere. So when I was in Chicago recently, I wanted to try out one of the trendy places as my touristy thing. At Intelligentsia Coffee, I saw this book for sale. I didn’t buy it then. I saw the same book a few days later, this time in paperback, for sale at a publisher exhibit. I didn’t buy it then. I did however, upon my return home, acquire said book […]

How I Learned to Accept my Hangover

A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present by Mark Forsyth

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I don’t know how I found this book, but somehow while freezing on the train platform in Tokyo on New Year’s morning, I located this little gem. I started to read it on my phone, as I stood huddled in a train car trying to not get elbowed by too many hungover locals on their way to see family. I’m told by a coworker that it’s a tradition in Japan. First you get hammered on New Year’s Eve and then travel to see your family […]

An illuminating book about the grossness of human behavior.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

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I went into this expecting the corruption, murder, institutional racism, etc. against the Osage Indians to be very bad, and I still somehow managed to come out of this book mindboggled. This book should be taught in schools, and it is heinous that these terrible things happened, and just as heinous that so many people covered it up, and practically erased it from history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the US were the Osage. By sheer coincidence, after their tribe was […]



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