Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

Reasons why this is a cookbook not for me, at least not at this time

Good Things by Samin Nosrat

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Sometimes it’s pretty clear when a book is probably just fine, but maybe not for you, or at least you right now. Good Things by Samin Nosrat has some good things going for it. It’s got a lot of parts where there ar basically sets of theme and variation on a recipe or ingredient which can be nice when you’ve got a lot of something but don’t want to get bored. The premise of focusing on kind of simple pleasures is also something I can […]

“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography CBR17 Pie Chart: Education CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens) Official summary: Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic […]

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight”

All The Way To The River (2025) by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Bingo square: RED (as in red flag as well as the cover). Content note: Cancer, death, drug addiction, abuse. I picked this book up because I read the excerpts elsewhere, and I was curious about the bigger picture–and also my thesis was on elegy, poems about dead people, and some of the questions that poets ask about how to remember the dead rather than create the dead in their own image still resonate with me. In Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across […]

“Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

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CBR17 Bingo: Review – I first came across Caitlin Doughty and her books through numerous reviewers on Goodreads. Caitlin Doughty had been long fascinated with death, but when she started working at a crematory, she soon found herself more interested in the question of why death in America has become so distant from the general public. I am maybe not the right audience for Doughty’s message about the loss of intimacy and ritual in the American way of death. I am a Hindu, and we […]

90s Pop Culture Drama FTW

Hits, Flops and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick

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Recently, a Gwyneth Paltrow biography was published and people were only too happy to revisit and re-examine the old gossip about the friendship breakdown between Paltrow and our 90s queen Winona Ryder. One of the articles referenced an excerpt from Ed Zwick’s memoir. The excerpt was about his struggle to get Shakespeare in Love made, although it was primarily focused on the behind the scenes drama associated with the original cast, focusing on a young Julia Roberts. It all read as very juicy and 90s, […]



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