Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Music and trash

The Girl Who Heard the Music: How One Pianist and 85,000 Bottles and Cans Brought New Hope to an Island by Mahani Teave and Marni Fogelson

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Mahani Teave grew up on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. And book report time: she was curious and precocious. She would learn to play piano, would amaze people with her talents, would learn in and travel Europe in her concerts, and eventually come home to help her people and beloved home. All of this is wrapped up in a poetic and romantic setting. Teave and Marni Fogelson create a story that is interesting and educational, but has a few small gaps in the […]

Yuta and Kyota found a loophole

Why I Adopted My Husband: The true story of a gay couple seeking legal recognition in Japan by Yuta Yagi

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Why I Adopted My Husband: The true story of a gay couple seeking legal recognition in Japan by Yuta Yagi is one of those books that you can give the book report on: it is from 2017 when two men show the world their love by becoming father and son…. sort of.  But legally, they are. When same sex marriages are illegal (in Japan), how do two men secure their basic rights, and deal with such things as inheritances and medical decisions? In an open, […]

Standing up for the community

Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?)  by Mary Fairhurst Breen 

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Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name?) by Mary Fairhurst Breen is a clever nonfiction book about everyday people who have made a name for themselves by just being themselves. We might not know them by that name (some people “only” fought the inclusion of a Chick-fil a on their college campus that resulted in Senator Graham making a fool of himself) but they made sure that others can have the freedom of being themselves, being represented, and finding ways to make it […]

Running Writer Contemplates Stuff

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

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Bingo 2: Asia & Oceania I’ve read a few of Haruki Murakami’s novels (in translation; I don’t read Japanese); I enjoyed them but they’re definitely something you need to be in the right mood for. His non-fiction What I Talk About When I Talk About Running sounds exactly like the kind of guy who would write some of those stories, at least style-wise. Murakami is a long-time distance runner as the title suggests, and basically he’s turned bits of his running journal into a nine […]

Take Me To Church

The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy by James Risen, Thomas Risen

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: politics. Frank Church was a Senator from Idaho and the famous committee that bears his name was a Senate committee investigating the dirty deeds of America’s surveillance state. I’ll say this much for The Last Honest Man: the writers know why you’re here. I didn’t pick this one up to learn about the classes Frank Church took in college or what his favorite restaurant was when he was dating his wife. I picked this up to learn about Frank Church and […]

The Circle Is Complete

The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder by Lawrence Block

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: nostalgia. This is the final book of a favorite series and it takes me back to when I began the series, as well as taking me back to a New York City that no longer exists. Fifteen years ago (fifteen!), I passed a rainy afternoon while on internship to read a Matthew Scudder book by Lawrence Block. I didn’t know it was the second in a long-running series; I had just grabbed it off a cart. It was fine. I […]



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