Bunny Mellon is one of the most interesting people in history that you have probably never heard about. Mrs. Mellon came onto my radar after I read Frank Langella’s subpar memoir during Cannonball 9 and the several Kennedy biographies I’ve read over the years but Meryl Gordon’s exhaustive biography was so much more interesting than I could have imagined. Bunny wanted to exert control over her environment yet give the illusion that everything was effortless. Her favorite saying was: “Nothing should be noticed.” Rachel “Bunny” […]
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
Educated is a force of nature. There is very little I can say here that hasn’t been said already, and probably more eloquently, but Tara Westover’s memoir about growing up the daughter of Mormon survivalists in Idaho was one of the best books I read in 2019. Oh, it is only January 6th? Nah, I stand by it. Educated felt like a combination between The Glass Castle and Beyond Belief while still remaining in a class all its own. “It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, […]
“[We’ll] never know how much of this book the squirrel wrote.”—Mindy Kaling
I received My Squirrel Days from the lovely emmalita during our Cannonball gift exchange. I was very excited because my library did not have Kimmy Schmidt’s Ellie Kemper’s memoir available to borrow and I must read all memoirs written by people with more than 50,000 Twitter followers (edit: apparently Ellie doesn’t have a Twitter but she has 546k Instagram followers so the sentiment is the same). There comes a time in every sitcom actress’s life when she is faced with the prospect of writing a […]
“We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
Happy New Year Cannonballers! Last year, despite achieving my goal of 120 books read and reviewed, I read about 20 books less than during Cannonball 9 which I attribute to spending a lot of time on books I either didn’t finish (Between the Bridge and the River) or spent more time than was necessary sloughing through (Map of Days). My goal this year, besides a humble Double Cannonball, is to allow myself to make quicker decisions regarding books I don’t want to finish. Luckily, I […]