Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I read two books in a row called “Savage [Something]”

Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe

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As a whole, I’m not as mad about true crime as many women are – though I’ve certainly been compelled by various stories over the years. Unpacking some of my childhood media memories (Tonya Harding, OJ Simpson, etc) led me to You’re Wrong About, and I also love Criminal – both because they pick interesting stories but offer a good mix. I can’t just do murder stories all the time. But I’ve been researching the genre for a project, and I heard Monroe quoted on […]

A bloody good time

Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment by Harold Schechter

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Kids see too much violence online/video games are too violent/TV is too violent/Comic books are too violent/Radio dramas are too violent/Dime novels are too violent/you get the picture! Harold Schechter provides a timeline of humanity’s fascination with violence from the era of oral storytelling to “today” (2005). I picked this up for research for a project, mostly because I wanted to learn more about true crime media, but it was a very good read. Granted, he didn’t have to convince me, but it was helpful […]

“A friend in need is a friend indeed, a friend who bleeds is better”

Workhorse (2025) by Caroline Palmer

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It’s been a weird year–a lot of work stress, some painful if not acute health stuff,  a lot of messy emotional knots, or perhaps unraveling, a lot of therapy, and reader’s block. But in the last days of the dying year, I did two things I have not done for a long time, one of which was stay up most of the night to finish a book. And that book was Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse, which I picked up in hardback on Christmas Eve because I […]

Successionary

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

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Look, I’m simple: if you bill a book as a “non-fictional Succession,” load it with family drama and a bunch of wannabe Richard IIIs and Lady Macbeths, and put billions of dollars and a major media or financial empire at stake, I’m absolutely going to devour it. This is no exception. As to the quality of the book, it’s fine. Quite good at times. James B. Stewart wrote the magnum opus of these kinds of books in Disneywar and I was kind of expecting that. But it didn’t […]

out of the way, Mr. Hughes. Let the real stars shine.

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood by Karina Longworth

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You’ve seen The Aviator, yes? If not, maybe you know that it’s about Howard Hughes? Yes- the Spruce Goose guy. Yes, the keep on failing upwards guy. Yes, the “keep your pee in jars” guy. We’ve all heard or seen at least a little bit about Howard Hughes. His reach was wide and heavy, and he swept away businesses, careers, and entire studios in his wake. Karina Longworth, author of Seduction and podcaster extraordinaire, covered Howard Hughes’s Hollywood during a whole season of her phenomenal podcast a […]

News from back then

Strange Victoriana: Tales of the Curious, the Weird and the Uncanny from Our Victorian Ancestors by Jan Bondeson

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Strange Victoriana, the first from my massive pile of Christmas swag, is an entertaining collection of the weird, wonderful, spooky, salacious, and sometimes downright macabre stories taken from the Illustrated Police News (IPN) – an immensely popular tabloid of the time (you’ll have seen some of its illustrations before, particularly if you’ve ever had any kind of interest in the Jack the Ripper case which the IPN went to town on). Victorians are often thought of as incredibly repressed and prudish, while a quick peruse […]



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