Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


My 2020 Resolution and a Cannonball!

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

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In December 2019, before we knew what the following months held in store, I made a New Year’s resolution to read On the Origin of Species. I have a beautiful folio edition that I received for my birthday, and I wanted to check it off my TBR list for a couple of reasons. First, as I’ve mentioned before, I learned as an adult how much I love science. Second, and more importantly, in a country where roughly 20% of adults reject the idea that humans […]

Three books, one review, (almost) endless reading

The Couch Potato by Jory John

Jabari Tries by Gaia Cornwall

A Garden in Your Belly: Meet the Microbes in Your Gut by Masha D’yans

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A short laundry list of picture books is what you’ll find here. These books, while are good, just do not lend themselves for a nice long solo review. I will start off with two that have a theme to them: A Life Lesson. A Life Lesson #1 is The Couch Potato by Jory John. This is the fourth in The Bad Seed series by John. It is a cute story about having an indoor and outdoor balance to one’s lifestyle. It is nice to be […]

Impractical knowledge is still knowledge!

How To by Randall Monroe

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I need to stop having expectations for books.  I thought this was going to be more like his book What If? which had strange situations and then gave a scientific method of answering the question.  This is taking a theoretically normal problem, but then solving it (still scientifically) in the weirdest and most impractical way possible.     (The version I have is an ARC, and I’m reading it on my phone, so things don’t always line up correctly. Which isn’t great, but hey, I didn’t […]

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]

The title of the book tells you everything you need with this one. (CBR12 Bingo)

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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I laughed out loud when I saw the How To square on this year’s bingo card – days before a friend had given me Randall Munroe’s latest  How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems when I had lamented my inability lately to sink into reading anything. Her answer to that problem (and it is a good answer) was something intended to be read in small pieces and not all at once, and something that is both humorous and full of interesting information. Checks […]



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