Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Archives for December 2021

“Love is a gift, and wanting to love things is a bigger gift”

The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan

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Courtney Milan is a treasure and frankly, this book should be mandatory reading in school. How are Hemingway and JD Salinger and all those other Sad White Dudes mandatory reading and this goddamn treasure of a human being is not? Plot: Amelia, a Chinese girl of six is adopted by British missionaries in Shanghai after the Taiping Rebellion. She is intensely bright and curious and all the things a good daughter of missionaries is not, but she tries so hard to be good, even if […]

“We are all lichens”

Life Entangled by Merlin Sheldrake

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This is the sort of book that can give you back a childlike wonder of the world. Good enough sell yet? I remember being a kid and thinking it was such a waste to live in this time because we already knew everything. There was nothing left to discover. Of course, then I learned abut space, and then about the deep sea, and it turns out there’s actually a rather shocking amount of stuff we don’t know. I would argue there is an overwhelming amount […]

Let’s spend a little of your hard-earned Christmas book buying budget on some books we wished we could have read as children.

What if, Pig? by Lizzie Hunter

Dad & The Dinosaur by Gennifer Choldenko

Captain Starfish by Davinia Bell

You've Got Dragons by Kathryn Cave

When You Are Brave by Pat Zietlow Miller

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AKA Why this week’s library haul had me in tears. There’s a lot to go over in this review, so I’m bear with me: There’s a reason these books are together like this, I promise. Dad & The Dinosaur by Gennifer Choldenko –Nicholas isn’t brave like his dad: He’s afraid of all sorts of things, like bugs, & darkness, & manhole covers.  But he has a secret weapon: A dinosaur that “likes the dark, bugs are nothing to them, and they eat manhole covers for […]

Fuck The Patriarchy

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy

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Best for: Women. People with women in their lives. Feminists. In a nutshell: Author and activist Eltahawy makes the case for the sins women should embrace as we seek to destroy the patriarch. Worth quoting: “I don’t want to be protected. I want to be free.” “I refuse to be civil with someone who refuses to acknowledge my humanity fully.” “But who indoctrinated those Republican white women? Who taught them to submit to patriarchy? Those are questions often reserved for Muslima women, but I demand […]

“Now the only thing I ask is that they respect the loneliness to come”

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

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Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín is a very brief book about a man who takes care of people wasting away from an unnamed disease in his beauty salon. Now known as the Terminal, the salon was once the narrator’s pride. It was a dazzling space where he and his two close friends would cut women’s hair and perform other beauty treatments. He describes being thrown out of his family home for being gay and how he built his beauty salon into a successful business. At […]

“Old people, young people. Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was.”

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

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I had just finished A Closed and Common Orbit and was eager to read another book by Becky Chambers.  Fortunately, my family gave me A Psalm for the Wild-Built for my birthday, so another one was on hand to be immediately dived into.  In A Closed and Common Orbit, Chambers dwells on purpose.  In a APftWB, she dives deeper into understanding what it means to have a purpose, why even have a purpose at all, and to not have a purpose, as well.  I had been delightfully […]



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