Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ride ’em cowgirl… or whatever you say to someone who rides English style

Horse Trouble by Kristin Varner

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I do not care what “horse people” think of Horse Trouble by Kristin Varner as it is a delightful story about a young girl who is dealing with the stress of her life and the horses are really “second thoughts that are important to the overall story but shouldn’t be nitpicked about.” The amount of information and images of horses comes from someone with a “horse background” and therefore, I take their lead. What I absolutely adored about this book is the realistic mother and […]

The crime, the punishment, the Americanized reporter

Honor by Thirty Umrigar

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The world of India is opened in a way few know within the pages of Honor by Thirty Umrigar. The Beauty and The Beast of this country with its different cultures, traditions, physical light and ugly are out in the open. When a Hindu woman and her Muslim husband, are attacked by her brothers, killing her husband, an American reporter takes on her story. Not just because another woman was involved in an Honor Killing, but because she is willing to stand up to her […]

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.” (Bingo Blackout & Cannonball!)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

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Books have answers, and that is one of the reasons I love them. The past few years I’ve spent some time digging into me, and how I work, and how much of what I have presented to the outside world was authentic, and how much was what I had been expected to do. I had some knowledge of aces and asexuality before reading this particularly as one of my friends is ace and has been out for at least the decade I’ve known her, probably […]

Abstract reading

Kaleidoscope by Brian Selznick

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Kaleidoscope is classic Brian Selznick with the illustrations. It is busy, crowded, soft, heavy, black and white, surreal and realistic. However, the story is not what I expect from Selznick. It is abstract. Several stories are contained into three parts: Morning, Afternoon and Evening. All of these stories feel as if they should be connected, but none actually seem to be actually connected. Or are they? There are images that show up in more than one story (the boys breaking into a place and burning […]

Sometimes All it Takes is “Good Onya Champ”

Un-cook Yourself: A Ratbag's Rules for Life by Nat's What I Reckon

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I think I’ve made it clear before that I am not someone who is normally drawn to self-help books. I have also mentioned that Audible kind of takes issue with this rather strongly, and insists on throwing suggestions my way. But through either sheer persistence or will, it turns out that one did stick Probably because it is kind of—in part—a piss-take of self-help books anyhow. The other half is a genuine call for you to keep your chin up Champion!—because it is completely normal […]

“It’s pretty common for the mere mention of the word disability to evoke fear, confusion, and an endless stream of misconceptions.”

Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau

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If you’re looking for a good, 101-level introduction to current disability discourse, including (but not limited to) models of disability (medical, social, charity, economic, human rights, etc); person-first vs. identity-first language; intersectionality; and what words to start using (just say disabled, my friend: we know) and what words to STOP saying (you know the big ones, but maybe also consider how often you use blind to mean ignorant, or lame to mean boring, and sweet baby junipers, please stop calling it ‘wheelchair-bound’: I am not […]



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