Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Object Lessons

Blue Jeans by Carolyn Purnell

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Blue jeans are a practically universal garment, but their sheer ubiquity belies their relatively short history and the staggering path they took to hit the mainstream. Blue Jeans is a short non-fiction book from a series called Object Lessons, which dives into the histories of the everyday objects in our lives that we’re so used to that we hardly consider them in any depth. I certainly look at my blue jeans now with fresh eyes, which is entirely the point. The book is divided into […]

An old man returns to his childhood home — a book review but also my earnest request for more Hollywood movies about Partition

The Persistence of Memory by Urvashi Butalia

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In my search to learn more about the partition of India after it gained independence from the British, Urvashi Butalia was a writer recommended by a Pakistani journalist friend who had done some reporting on this issue. Ten minutes of Google and I was able to find The Persistence of Memory, which ended up being a quick and satisfying read. Butalia follows Bir Bahadur Singh as he travels to Pakistan in his 70s, eager to return to his home village Thoa Khalsa for a visit […]

Skirts Just Look So Good on Us!

Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

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Fashion can say a lot about the people that wear it and the places they occupy in time and space. As such, women starting to wear pants is a shorthand for progress in feminism – but, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell argues, the evolution of skirts over the twentieth century too has plenty to say. Like the author, I wear a lot of dresses and skirts, mostly because they are an easy way to look like you’ve made an effort, and also let you slouch and lounge around […]

All Roads Lead to the Oedipus Complex

The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert Lindner

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CBR17 Bingo: Red – Behold, the cover. Robert Lindner, a prominent psychoanalyst during the 1940s, relates five unusual cases he has worked on – a murderer, a Communist, a bulimic, a Fascist, and a physicist who believed he was living a parallel life as overlord of a distant star system. I’m not sure where I heard of this book – most likely through the case of “Kirk Allen,” whose story of science fiction delusion is related in the final chapter of the book. While it […]

“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 […]

“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 […]



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