Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Barbara did whatever she set her mind to do

Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World by Sarah MacKenzie

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You might have read my review of Dear Duck, Please Come! by Sarah MacKenzie and Charles Santoso and learned that I was trying to read Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World by Sarah MacKenzie and illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen instead, but a mix up with the online link brought me to the duck book. It was a nice surprise, but I still wanted to read about Cooney and was eventually able to locate another online link to the book. Therefore,  I was able […]

An extraordinary friendship (cannonball!)

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien by John Hendrix

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The Mythmakers is a graphic story written for middle schoolers and older. The narrators of this biography/history are a lion (CS Lewis) and a Wizard (JRR Tolkien). The Mythmakers covers the life stories of each man in brief as well as going into detail on their ideas about storytelling and myths. Lewis and Tolkien shared some remarkable things in common but clearly they were two very different men whose friendship inspired them to write their greatest works. Yet their differences (other relationships, perhaps jealousy, differences […]

Kind of a Miserable Home, Actually

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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Alison Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of representation of women in media. (For those who don’t know, the test asks whether a particular work features more than one woman, whether those women have a conversation with one another, and whether that conversation centers around a topic other than a man.) But Alison Bechdel is also a cartoonist who created a long-running cartoon strip and two graphic novel memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was her first graphic memoir, and […]

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”

Educated by Tara Westover

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CBR 16 Bingo – Dreams: Tara dreamed of an education, and then fulfilled those dreams. “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.” We selected this book one month last year for my book club, but I didn’t end up reading it then because I was insanely busy that month […]

Great for sports fans and non-sports-fans alike (bingo)

The Boys in the Boat: The True Story of an American Team's Epic Journey to Win Gold at the 1936 Olympics by Daniel James Brown, Gregory Mone (adaptor)

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CBR 16 Bingo – Rings: Olympics “He saw the power of trust, the strength of the affection that sometimes grew between a pair of young men. Or among a boatload of them striving honestly to do their best.” My family has a history of rowing. Both my parents participated in the sport, and now they indoctrinated me and my brother with it as well. Because of this, my interpretation of this book might be different than someone who read it without understanding the sport, since […]

Rage against the dying of the light

Men Have Called Her Crazy (2024) by Anna Marie Tendler

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Bingo square rage. I think this completes my bingo row, along with fanfic, fiasco, earth day, golden Content note for the book: suicidal ideation, eating disorders, self harm, mental health “Now I’m furious, so angry my whole body feels hot, and I can tell I’m about to cry.” (p. 211) I’m (still) a fan of Tendler’s ex-husband–and I love that this isn’t about him. Well, it’s about him in the sense that he’s the ‘unfaithful husband’ of the narrative, presumably, the shadow that lurks behind […]



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