Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“By making me a bitch, you have freed me from the trite, sexist, bourgeois prison of ‘likability.’ Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.’

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 23/30 This was great. I’m not normally a fan of celebrity memoirs, because in my experience the books are often being written just because the celebrity wants to write a book, and there’s no literary reason for the book to exist. I don’t mean that in a snobby way, but more in the way that said celebrities just don’t have anything to say, or they think they have something to say but they are often wrong. Alison Arngrim […]

Corona Days

Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost

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After two-plus years of successfully evading the coronavirus, it finally caught up to me last week. Fortunately, my symptoms were mild (vaccinated and boosted), the only one lingering was fatigue. That and family responsibilities left me little time to write reviews this past week. So I decided to put these three here instead of my monthly dump because they were all worthy of longer reviews, two good, one damn fine. Honor Thy Father **** One of the things that made The Sopranos such an excellent television […]

Weirdos, teenagers, degenerates, and women

Ship It by Britta Lundin

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“Real writing” is done by serious people, whereas fanfiction is written by weirdos, teenagers, degenerates, and women.” This is a comics convention. When did this industry start caring about what fourteen-year-old girls like? Have you ever found a book that feels as if it was written just for you? From the first two chapters, I was in love with this book. Small town girl – Check. Self-identified outcast – Check. Obsessed over a band or a show or a movie to the point of writing […]

Two Scottish bozos in a camper van.

Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other by Sam Heughan & Graham McTavish

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I have not seen the STARZ TV show this book is the account of making, but this book (and the audiobook specifically) was a pretty good time. (STARZ insisted on naming the TV show Men in Kilts, but its original name was Clanlands, as this book makes pretty clear without actually stating it.) If you want something extremely goofy, spotted through with Scottish history, this is your book. The book is told by both Graham and Sam in alternating POV sections as they narrate the […]

Kindle enthusiasm

Once Is Not Enough by Jaqueline Susann

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This pandemic has made everything hard, including reading. Something that I love to do, but somehow didn’t want to concentrate that hard to do … until I got a Kindle. This is not an ad. But the times we are living in have encouraged a few bigger-than usual purchases. Since I haven’t been spending my money elsewhere (or anywhere), one of those purchases was a Kindle. It has seemed easier for me to read some titles on this device for a few reasons. First, I […]

“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

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Like a lot of people, I read this in close proximity to She Said, the other book published in 2019 about breaking the Harvey Weinstein story. (I liked She Said better. I liked that both authors were ladies, and I liked the close focus on true journalism and building relationships with their sources; it really centered the women’s stories and how they had been affected.) But this one is different enough in tone and style that it brings a lot to the table, as well, […]



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