Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bark once for yes, wag twice for no

The Dog Diaries: Ginger by Kate Klimo

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The Dog Diaries follow the lives of different breeds throughout their lives. With the first book (though I am assuming you do not have to read in any order), Ginger, we see a Golden Retriever narrating her life from her puppy mill birth to her various homes. The modern language shows how some people act/feel/treat pets. The use of “Rainbow Bridge” for the death of dogs was a bit heavy-handed for this reader, but most people should be fine. The other part was the reference […]

Fall 2019 Needs to Hurry Up

Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu

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This is a collection of a web comic created by Ngozi Ukazu about the fictional Samwell hockey team. It’s one of NPR’s best books of 2018, but I found it through the Puck Soup hockey podcast. If you don’t like/know anything about hockey and found college to be less than great you will still enjoy this. I love hockey and laughed so hard. But it’s much more about the relationships between friends during a couple of years of their lives. The main character is Eric […]

Bite-sized sorcery and sunshine

GMorning, GNight! little pep talks for me & you by Lin-Manuel Miranda

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I wanted my first read of this year, and my first CBR11 review, to be of Gmorning Gnight for a lot of reasons: Because I don’t know about you, but I could use some pep talks.  Because Lin-Manuel defines happiness to me, seems like maybe he’s a sorcerer, and somehow manages to elevate even tweets to an artform.  Because the illustrations of Jonny Sun shine with a Silverstein-ian simplicity that radiate glee and grace.   Because “its nice to have things to hold on to, some […]

Bringing colour and life to a childhood under apartheid

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

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In the world of celebrity memoirs, this book is a gem.  Although Noah gives us bits and pieces of how he got from the ‘hoods of Johannesburg to replacing Jon Stewart on the Daily Show (ie: being the funny guy to avoid being an outcast), his book is really about growing up mixed race under apartheid in South Africa.  The stories are sometimes almost too wild to believe (he was pushed from a moving car to escape a potential murder or assault, the domestic violence described […]

Have you ever been turned down by a girl who afterwards married and then been introduced to her husband?

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

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This is the first of the Jeeves book and contains eight short stories, three of which are more or less about Bertie Wooster, in the early persona of Reggie Pepper. These earlier stories are good in their own right, and especially kind of dark and villainous in hilarious ways, but they lack two essential qualities of the rest of the series — Wooster’s affable ineptitude and Jeeves’s understated brilliance. The other stories include my first introduction to the characters, and also apparently the only story […]

It’s Worse Than That; He’s Dead, Jim.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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 This book was the perfect little bit of escapism to get me through a long, challenging weekend recently. It’s a really funny little book that goes a lot deeper than you think it would on the surface. Andrew Dahl has been posted in the Intrepid, the flagship of the UU fleet. It seems like a real career boost and he’s looking forward to it. Until he gets to the Xenobiology lab. Why does everyone hide when the senior officers arrive? Why is it everyone is […]



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