Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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CBR 16 Bingo – Pride: LGBTQ+ author “I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy” I read this book for my book club in June, for pride month, since we try to plan our books in acordance to the different heritage months. We also try to have diversity in the types of books we choose, and we hadn’t had a graphic novel yet this year, so we ended up settling on Fun Home as our book. […]

Sweet Memoir With A Touch of Self-Help

I Haven't Been Entirely Honest With You by Miranda Hart

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Best for: Those who have been going through some things and are looking for some sweet advice delivered by a lovely writer. In a nutshell: Writer and actor Hart updates her story by sharing her struggles with chronic illness, and what she’s found to be helpful in not just facing those challenges but in thriving as a person. Worth quoting: There’s a lot of wisdom in this book, and I wish I had a physical copy to follow along, but alas I didn’t write down […]

Makes You Wanna Holla

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

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cbr16 bingo Rage New Orleans East is a section of town, within the city’s borders, that is nothing like the rest of New Orleans.  It was reclaimed swampland, drained by a couple of Texan developers in the 1950s for the city of tomorrow.  New Orleans was booming at the time, with a massive NASA plant building the Titan rockets.  (Made sense – there was a harbor and it was halfway between Houston and Cape Canaveral.)  New Orleans East was supposed to draw in all the […]

Interestingly written biography

Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler by Ibi Zoboi

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CBR 16 Bingo – Celestial: The book is based around a continuous metaphor of Octavia Butler being from the stars or generally connected to them. A couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to go to the Walter Dean Myers awards, and this was one of the runners-up. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, especially since I haven’t read any of Octavia Butler’s works, but I got it and it seemed like a good fit for Bingo this year, so I finally […]

“It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.”

The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

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I remember reading in my Intro to Psychology college text book that Schizophrenia is the “cancer of mental illnesses.” Because Schizophrenia has reared its ugly head in my family, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. Dealing with it is tragic and life altering. I feel like I’m always trying to figure out more about it, so I find myself reading books on the subject. A couple of years ago, I read Hidden Valley Road, a non-fiction book about a large family where over half the kids […]

Hooray for Hollywood

The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger

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cbr16 bingo Fanfic Growing up in mid-century Palm Springs, summers could be long and boring (no pool).  TV options were very limited, but there was the mid-afternoon Million Dollar Movie.  That was my mom’s favorite thing to watch as she did the ironing (everything was cotton – there was a lot of ironing for a six-person family) so I would get sucked in too.  I can credit those summers with being familiar with all the actors in this book. This is a very detailed look […]



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