Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In defense of Pippin, the actual best hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

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I did not care for the Lord of the Rings when I was younger. It took my then-boyfriend three attempts at making me watch through the series before I could stay awake past Boromir dying. It just that Boromir takes too damn long to die. But he persisted and fed me tasty things to keep me awake and I discovered LOTR (or the LORT we call it at home) meme groups online and suddenly I was in baby. I mean, I needed to understand the underlying […]

“The ‘we saved 4 people’ refrain bounces harmlessly off the imposing Germanic fortress of deontological theory.”

How To Be Perfec by Mike Schur

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Fans of the Good Place have probably already read this book or have it on their TBR, so instead, I’m going to focus this review on folks who have not watched, or watched but didn’t enjoy (which I am told is a real population of people that exist) the Good Place. Ethics are hard. Teaching ethics is also hard, for a great number of reasons. Chief among them is that a) the subject matter is impossible to nail down and b) each person’s approach to […]

“When you’re poor, you live in an alternate reality.”

Finding Me by Viola Davis

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After my very positive experience listening to Tom Hanks narrate The Dutch House, I was eager to listen to another great actor for my next audiobook. I think I saw that Viola Davis’s memoir, Finding Me (2022), had great reviews, and I decided to give it a shot. I admire Viola Davis as an actor, and I’ve seen her in a number of things. However, I really did not know anything about her life before reading this book. She has overcome unimaginable hardship. It is amazing that she’s […]

So Many People Failed Her

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

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Best for: People interested in how youth stardom, misogyny, and failures of the justice system can impact someone. In a nutshell: Singer Spears shares her story, from being a teen star and one of the most famous people in the English-speaking world, through the conservatorship that kept her under lock and key for over a dozen years. Worth quoting: “I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself.” Why I chose it: As someone who consumed a […]

Disney tricked me and I’m not even mad!

If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy

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I have loudly declared for a long time that we should have a hiatus on all Cinderella remakes. And I have rallied for a shorter time on the sad habit of Disney retreading old IP over and over again. It’s not that I am so mad about them redoing the same fairy tales all the time, but in a world where there are truly hundreds of versions of their Disney Princess tales, why not tell a fresh version of the story? I decided to read […]

Kawaii Ghosts

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (author(, Polly Barton (translator)

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CBR Bingo- Asia/Oceana- BINGO! Where the Wild Ladies Are is a collection of Japanese folk tales retold with a feminist point of view. The tales all have ghosts in them, but they are mostly cute or beautiful ghosts, and not scary ghosts. The only one I thought was a bit tense was The Peony Lanterns, a story about two traveling saleswomen where things start escalating and then seppuku or ritual suicide is suggested, but not really. If you’ve ever tried to get rid of a […]



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