Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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This memoir had been on my radar for some time, but I just wasn’t sure if I had the emotional wherewithal to read a book about losing your mother to cancer. I had been thinking about it ever since I watched Michelle Zauner’s band, Japanese Breakfast, play on Saturday Night Live (sidebar: I looked it up to see when that performance occurred, and it was in 2022. WHAT EVEN  IS TIME). However, when I had to do a very quick book shop to get something […]

Girl in a Band: A Memoir

Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon

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I have to confess I have never been a particular fan of Sonic Youth. I would read about them in Sassy, but I didn’t really hear much of their music other than when the Kool Thing video played on Much Music, and I just didn’t really love it. The band had an aura of cool (New York, friends with Chloe Sevigny, etc) that felt really beyond me because I just did not get it. However, I was in a used record store this spring and […]

”Life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting my friend”

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

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Cbr17bingo Arts Like millions around the world, I am a Beatles fan. An obsession developed when I was about 12 years old and lasted through my high school years. I spent all my money on Beatles records. They were my first real music love. Many decades have passed since then but my love was renewed when I saw Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary on Disney+ a few years ago. And thanks to Facebook’s algorithm, my feed has been flooded with Beatles-related posts ever since. As […]

Lee Miller’s War

Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke

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Model, muse, photographer, war correspondent – Lee Miller wore many hats and lived many lives, and along the way intersected with major figures in the Surrealist movement. Lee Miller had the tumultuous sort of life that makes for fascinating reading, and considering I knew very little about her past the famous picture of her bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, everything I read was a revelation. She worked so closely with more prominent artists of the Surrealist movement as both model and collaborator that it astounds me […]



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