Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Gardening to Victory

Gardens for Victory by Jean Marie Putnam & Llyod C. Cosper

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In a box my grandmother hadn’t opened for probably fifty years, she found a swath of old family documents, and in it was this book, Gardens for Victory, a comprehensive  guide to teach Americans how to  supplement their ration cards during World War II with sustainable gardening. We have no idea how the little pamphlet never got thrown away; the spine was very bent and the pages dog-eared, meaning my great-grandparents probably followed its instructions during the war for their own gardens. The fact that it had […]

How to do it (better than you) (CBR12Bingo2: how to)

Cooking by Michael Pollan

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Man, this is a good contender for the color square too because boy howdy can Michael Pollan’s writing turn to purple prose at times. I love reading about food, much to my coworker’s confusion, and particularly books like this, that view cooking as a whole rather than a collection of recipes. I know that reading about food is like dancing about architecture, to borrow from Frank Zappa, but when Pollan waxes poetic at times I wanna roll my eyes. It doesn’t help that Pollan can […]

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

New crafts for a pandemic #How-To

Sewing for Dummies by Jan Saunders Maresh

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Bingo Square: How-To I decided this pandemic period that I would take up sewing! I love crafts and hate trying on clothes in stores. Also, I’d been gifted a sewing machine by my very sweet mother-in-law a few Christmases ago, and now I finally had some extra money to be able to buy fabric and get to sewing! Spoiler alert: it’s super fun and I have spent way too much money on cute fabric. Not knowing where to start (and not interested in taking classes, […]

For the Planetary Good – A Survival Guide

Turning the Tide on Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again by Lucy Siegle

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers approximately 1,6 million square kilometres, plastic has been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on Earth, and by 2050 there could be more pieces of plastic in the ocean than fish. These are the facts Lucy Siegle tells us in the first part of this book, along with the backstory of the plastic dilemma, the truth about recycling, and the way plastic is pushed on us by retailers and manufacturers. In the second […]



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