Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Violating the Status Quo

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema by Anne Helen Petersen

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CBR 15 Bingo – Dwelling: All the people discussed in this book work and live in Hollywood – both town and concept – which for better or for worse casts a long shadow across their lives. Hollywood has always banked on its stars and their stories as a promotional tool, so heavily that when actors openly diverge from their public personas it often causes backlash among the public. Especially in the first half-century of Hollywood, stars were marketed with particular stories and personas, often as […]

“The further you get from home, the weirder things get.”

The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Colin Dickey

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Colin Dickey is a writer on the fringe. His books are about those who fear secret societies (Under the Eye of Power), an American history of ghosts (Ghostland), and monsters/aliens (The Unidentified). In The Unidentified, Dickey meets with and explores what it is that draws people to fringe beliefs. One of his theories is that these fringe beliefs, be they in cryptids or aliens, provide us belonging, comfort, and enchantment in a disenchanted world: “Much of what attracts people to these fringe beliefs is a […]

What a colossal disappointment.

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today by Rachel Vorona Cote

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I heard about this book a few months ago and I was immediately intrigued. I wanted a thoughtful, interesting, and possibly irreverent commentary on how the rules and regulations of Victorian society (you know- something like the title of the book) still keep us in check today, but what I got instead was a self-indulgent combination of temper tantrum and pity party. The concept is fascinating: using examples from Victorian literature, frame how modern women are still locked into the same constraints. Sounds interesting! Sounds […]

Outdated, but easy to see why it’s popular.

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I’m afraid I don’t really have much interesting commentary to contribute to the discourse around Freakonomics. The first edition was published over 10 years ago, and I strongly suspect that the contents seemed much more “rogue” then, than they do now, in the thick of a Big Data revolution where these type of interdisciplinary data-mining projects to form sociological hypotheses have become altogether common and trendy. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner have a good sense for interesting topics and an accessible approach to exploring them, as […]

No more for the girl next door

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I wasn’t particularly interested in this one when it first came out. I’ve only ever really seen Aziz on Parks&Rec, and I’m not a stand up comedy kind of gal usually so I didn’t know almost anything about his comedy. When I discovered, reading reviews of my fellow lovely Ballers, that is was actually a sociology book with some humor mixed in I was way more on board. Modern Romance came about from Aziz being curious about how people are finding each other in our […]

Why Going Shopping on Sundays Makes me Light Fires and Read More

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This review is for the audio version of this book. As a public service announcement, I recommend that you check in with your local library to see if they support OneClickdigital or other apps that let you download audiobooks to your smartphone via library membership. I have listened to a lot of hot bestsellers this way for free! Free! For years, I have been gaining weight and getting more boring. Finally, I looked in the mirror and was like, “Who is that guy?” Then I […]



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