Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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There is nothing Shakespeare didn’t anticipate.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

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CBR14 BINGO: Gaslight Square (BINGO! Bodies to Gaslight BINGO! Snake to Gaslight) (For the literal: Takes place in the mid-19th century when gaslight was used. Figuratively: everyone gaslights each other in this one. Full of manipulative spouses, parents, siblings, neighbors, friends, and politicians.) Decades ago I was well into an American Civil War historical fiction rabbit hole. I read a lot of it. In that pile of reading, there was quite a bit about John Wilkes Booth whether he was the main character or part of a subplot. All […]

What if we’re underwhelmed instead?

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book starts in the middle with a bang, with her main character, Rosemary Cooke, away at college and undergoing some youthful rebellion. Rosemary tells us of what seems like her idyllic early life back in the mid-west: she has two loving parents, an older brother, Lowell, and a younger sister, Fern. Lowell is someone to look up to while Fern is Rosemary’s shadow half- they are raised to do everything together, dressed in matching outfits and speak in their own language. Rosemary […]

June 2022 Leftovers

The Cage by Bonnie Kistler

Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg

Gone 'Til November by Wallace Stroby

Cover Story by Susan Rigetti

Survivor's Guilt by Robyn Gigl

The Old Man by Thomas Perry

Iron Annie by Luke Cassidy

The Drop by Michael Connelly

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw

Barbed Wire Heart by Tess Sharpe

Amateur City by Katherine V. Forrest

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

The Fury of Blacky Jaguar by Angel Luis Colón

He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

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I was dealing with work turmoil and on vacation for most of June so I didn’t get the chance to write as many in depth reviews as I’d have liked to. Which is a shame because some of these deserved a longer look; I just didn’t have the time or energy… The Cage **** I went back-and-forth on my review. I’ve been giving out a lot of 4-star reviews lately and considered docking the book for that reason since it’s very borderline. But the more I […]

I’ll begin our story with that afternoon, we hadn’t spoken for a year…

Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard

Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler

The Warmest December by Bernice McFadden

Ordinary Light by Tracy K Smith

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

Unfinished Business by Vivian Gornick

Thick and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Rosa Parks In her own Words by Susan Reyburn

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Sunshine State: 2/5 Stars A collection of essays ostensibly about Florida by Sarah Gerard, known for her previous novel Binary Star. Most reviewers (or at least the ones less impressed by this book) seem to land on the idea that the biographical essays are strong while the others are not. I think I fall in the other direction. The book is made of two-three kinds of essays: autobiographical/memoir pieces that range from quite impressionistic and meditative to more story-driven and then nonfiction profile pieces that also […]

Not in the way of the ancient greeks, but like a human loves a dog, or a robot loves a human, or occasionally, the way a gorilla loves a kitty

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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This is a spoiler-tastic review. Proceed with caution. Can you complain that a book about a family adopting a chimpanzee is predictable? I think I’ve spent too much time reading about behavioral studies and animal behavior because I knew about quite a few of the real-life chimps this book seemed to take inspiration from, including poor Nim Chimpsky who seems to be the primary source for the novel. But it’s less the science that’s predictable; this chimp’s sister, the protagonist of our book, has a […]

Where I’m reminded expectations can kill

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

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Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to […]



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