Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Grounded in reality, gripping science fiction: cbr12bingo White Whale

SevenEves by Neal Stephenson

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SevenEves is my “White Whale” for Cannonball bingo 12.  When it came out, my spouse raved about it and in the five years since its release, SevenEves keeps cropping up on “best of lists” and positive Cannonballer reviews.  Despite all the positivity, I was resistant to reading based on size and how that could affect my cannonball.  The White Whale square gave me an excellent reason to move it to the top of the TBR. To some extent, my title says it all.  SevenEves is one […]

From the depths of hell, I stab at thee! (CBR12Bingo: White Whale)

The Second City: Backstage at the world's greatest comedy theater by Sheldon Patinkin

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I have owned this book for twenty years. I remember getting it when it came out. I am a comedy nerd. My parents love The Second City. This book should have been a homerun for me. It absolutely was not. There is a reason this book took me twenty years to read. It felt like it took twenty years once I started.  And, incidentally, I started it about four times and every time put it the hell back down because I couldn’t make myself want […]

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

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CBR12Bingo – White Whale This might be the whalest of my white whale books. Heck, even as far as White Whales go, I have read Moby Dick a handful of times, and while it’s scattered, it’s completely readable to me. So this one though is all over the place. So while I have read this now, there’s a near infinite number of bits scattered all over my brain. To think of it as a complete text feels wrong, in the sense of reading it as […]

“When you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

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#CBR12 Bingo: White Whale (on my TBR list since early 2014) (Would also work for Cannonballer Says, Debut, or Red or Yellow – depending on what edition of the novel you are reading) Don Tillman lives his life on a fairly rigid schedule. He eats the same things every week, he has set aside a certain amount of time for work, exercise, cleaning his flat and so forth, and any deviations that force him to change the schedule makes him annoyed. He doesn’t socialise much, except for the […]

May We Be the Fortunate Ones (Bingo #6 & 7)

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It took me a long time to read Daughter of Fortune. By some cosmic joke, which the reading gods seem to enjoy, I had paced my book choices in such a way that this book overlapped with Jane Eyre and that is quite a lot of heavy book to process all at once. What it did for me (besides slow me down a bit) was provide an opportunity to compare and contrast two different powerhouse women writers writing about the self-determination of their female leads. […]

From multiple attempts, I stab at thee!

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This is my CBR White Whale for two reasons. One: I don’t remember when I bought this book, but I’m certain I wasn’t pregnant and the kid is one and a half, so it’s been a minute; two: this beast is nearly 1000 pages.  I’m a sucker for cheap books and this was dozens of short stories about time travel – my favorite sci-fi variation – for 2.50 at a local bookstore. I had to buy it, especially because the authors included in this short […]



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