Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It is a truth universally acknowledged that giraffes aren’t all that sexy.

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev

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I was excited to read this, as it is a well documented fact that I am a total sucker for any and all Austen retellings. I recently enjoyed Unmarriageable, and was hoping to ride the wave of fun Austen stories here. I began to read, hoping for a fun, gender-swapped modern version of one of my favorite stories. AND THEN I REMEMBERED THE BOLLYWOOD BRIDE. (Oh my. I really despised that book. Remember that #cannonbookclub? Yikes.) Ugh. The good news is that this story is […]

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A Flynn

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What if, in a future not long from now, time travel was a real, government sponsored thing? With a competitive selection process for its various missions – some successful, some not – would you be willing to risk your actual life, as well as the life as you know it, in order to participate? Strangely, in this future, in which almost all animals are extinct (something called the mysterious “die off”) and all food is created via 3D printing technology, officials are using this amazing […]

“It was as if Boeing built one plane and, without doing a single flight test, told airline passengers, ‘Hop aboard.’”

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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The following paragraphs are my meager attempt at Melrose Place fan fiction in order to demonstrate my feelings right now upon finishing this book. Please bear with me. Imagine it’s a Monday night in the late 1990s and you’re sitting on your couch watching TV, when Melrose Place comes on. Would you think it was crazy if something like this happened: Dr. Kimberly Shaw gets an idea to invent a medical device that could CHANGE THE WORLD. She tells everyone around her that her invention […]

Being brave isn’t the same as being okay.

Queenie by Candice Carty-WIlliams

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I hadn’t heard of Queenie, until I read vel veeter’s recent review, and made an immediate mental note to check it out. I’m glad I did. From Amazon: Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several […]

“Whoever said running in the morning gives you energy never had a day job that involves customer service.”

You by Caroline Kepnes

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You was a bizarre reading experience for me. I had heard of the show on Netflix, and was sort of aware that it was based on a book. I think I knew that it was about a sociopathic stalker, but honestly, didn’t care to know any more than that. I didn’t think it was for me. And then. Well, I have this friend. She’s extraordinarily talented and has been getting some amazing jobs as a director recently. She’s been doing episodes of Queen Sugar, The […]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This was an interesting story that I appreciated far more than I enjoyed. Candace Chen is a 20-something in middle-management at a Manhattan publishing company, in the specialty Bible division. She is good at her job, but she doesn’t really like much about it. It’s a job, it pays the bills. But she has no passion for it. But Candace, like many of her generation, doesn’t really know what it is that she actually does have passion for. She used to like photography, and had […]



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