Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Part 9 Only Posting Already Done Review Now Let’s See How Many Are Left Over After That I Will Never Do This To Y’All Again

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment by Jessica Wapner

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America by Matt Kracht

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Book 41: Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll Rough Review: 5 stars. This is an interesting book. I’ve tagged it both as True Crime and Historical Fiction. Its relationship to the idea of “based on a true story” is fascinating. I’m not sure I’ve read a book quite like this before, and I think I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. That’s not a knock against it, the subject matter is quite brutal and the fact that it’s based on a (n infuriating) true […]

Nightmares of the Fourth Reich

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

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Without a doubt, the best thing I’ve read so far this year. Quarter of the way through and not much comes close. As I’ve said many times, I don’t like dystopias that lean too hard into the dystopic-aspect. I like them with the axis of earth just tilted slightly; looking at reality through a cracked mirror. In other words, take scary parts of society and bend them a little to suit your story. Laila Lalami more than delivers that here. What’s frightening about The Dream Hotel is […]

a book that is well written but infuriating

The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

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Is it fair to downgrade this book because it’s hard to read? And by which I mean, the plot tears at your heart and makes you furious at times. I guess maybe not, but that is what I feel and so that is how I will rate this. Fair trigger warnings: this book has anything and everything you’d expect to see in a “faithful and true” recounting of Spanish conquistadors lathing their way through La Florida–there’s sexual assault, slavery, cannibalism, emaciation, the whole kit and […]

A little bit of everything

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

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The Amazon review (right before it tries to pitch me American Dirt, I mean, really?!) calls this a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, and yeah, that all tracks. The Other Americans starts with and centers on the hit-and-run death of Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, but the real story is that of his daughter Nora and how it impacts her but there are also chapters from his wife, from Nora’s former classmate-turned-policeman-turned-love-interest, from the detective on the case, from a […]



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