Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sid is a Jerk

Half-Blook Blues by Esi Edugyan

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As a person of mixed race (White mother, Black father) who loves the blues, I thought that a book like Half-Blood Blues (featuring several mixed race characters and blues) would be right up my alley.  It was not.  In fact, it took me nearly a week to read the first 50 pages and I was bored to death almost the whole time.  On page 54 things finally (finally!) got interesting from a story standpoint, but I still had to contend with the writing, which never took off for me.  This is in part because I struggle with reading dialogue written […]

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2/24/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:6 |

Both Sides…or at least his side

Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins

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Not Dead Yet is a memoir of my favorite musical artist. I will be honest that I am not much of a memoir/biography guy and have avoided reading them unless cornered into doing so. However, Not Dead Yet is actually a pretty entertaining read. Phil Collin’s delivery of his memories can be a little jarring at first. I would liken it to talking with an older relative who is both verbose and perhaps boiling over with memories to share. Often during the course of the memoir a period of linear story telling will jump forward in time to other events that […]

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1/6/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:1 |

Semisonic’s drummer on life in the ’90s music biz

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life by Jacob Slichter

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Semisonic’s Feeling Strangely Fine came out in 1998. I was a slouchy eighth-grader who was battling severe nodular acne, braces, and a wildly inappropriate volume of palm sweat. Lucky for me, I also played guitar. Conversations with anyone were hard, but rocking out was natural. Music is where I felt comfortable and found myself. It’s how I made friends and a life. In So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, Semisonic drummer Jake Slichter tells a similar story. He wasn’t a particularly cool teenager, but he had a drum kit. That was enough to get him into a local Midwestern funk […]

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10/17/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:30 |

An absolutely perfect little book.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

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I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me. Until Rainbow Rowell, that is. Rainbow Rowell doesn’t fill her books with dense poetry. She isn’t a […]

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10/10/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:90 |

A mostly good story with a lovely soundtrack

Tess Gerritsen by Playing with Fire

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  (For maximum review enjoyment, please listen to the video!) One of the benefits of listening to the audiobook for this was the presence of the music.  Incendio is the waltz that is central to the book, and in the audiobook you can hear it throughout the narration.  It was not until I was finished with the book that I saw that the author had composed Incendio!  (So to all the people who claimed that the music “detracted” from the story, you suck.  Because here, the written music is just as important as the written word!)  It really is a […]

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3/31/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:7 |

Welcome to the 80s

The War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

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If I was writing this review back when I’d read this book the first time, I would have given it a firm 5 stars and been proselytizing it all over the place. It was the first urban fantasy I’d ever encountered, and the story really got me as a college aged writing major. With that being said, I did a close-read on it for my MFA, and d*mn those close readings for ruining a book I have such fond memories of! This is not to say Bull’s craft is bad; it’s not…it’s actually quite brilliant, and her character development is […]

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3/14/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:5 |

Next Stop?

Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo

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The blurb on the cover of this novel compares it to Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, and that’s what drew me to it as well as the basic concept—an indie musician is trying to jumpstart her career after a second album slump. Anna Brundage is said musician, who I picture as looking something like Neko Case but who is not nearly as endearingly goofy or as attached to animals as Case is. Anna is the daughter of a famous conceptual artist, who created giant art installations where he split apart things like prisons and bridges and trains. She was an […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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12/31/2015 | 's CBR7 Review No:59 |

The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life

It's a Long Story: My Life by Willie Nelson

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As a proud and earnest Texian, I see Willie Nelson as one of the state’s greatest offerings. He captures so well so many of the contradictions inherent in the Texas that I love. Willie loves the Lord, his family, music, smoking, and occasionally  kicking some ass.  I love all of those things, and I love Willie Nelson, too. It’s A Long Story is not Willie Nelson’s first book; it’s not even his first autobiography. However, I do think this is the definitive Willie biography. Written in the easy phrasing and cadence of his songs, It’s a Long Story spans 82 […]

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Funds raised are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name.

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12/18/2015 | 's CBR7 Review No:53 |

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