Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

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Last year, I fell off the CBR wagon when COVID shut down all of our libraries and I was unaccustomed to actually buying books. Then I may have forgotten to return the books I already had out and accrued a fine. So I started 2021 determined to complete a 52 book Cannonball but obliged to pay for books until I settled my library account. Without the luxury of picking ten books and being free to abandon anything that didn’t work out in the first chapter, […]

“There’s nothing quite like the futility of being seventeen in an election year.”

Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli/Aisha Saeed

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Official book description: YES Jamie Goldberg is cool with volunteering for his local state senate candidate—as long as he’s behind the scenes. When it comes to speaking to strangers (or, let’s face it, speaking at all to almost anyone), Jamie’s a choke artist. There’s no way he’d ever knock on doors to ask people for their votes…until he meets Maya.   NO Maya Rehman’s having the worst Ramadan ever. Her best friend is too busy to hang out, her summer trip is canceled, and now […]

Did Amy Schumer and I just become best friends?

The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

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This was my second reading of The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I LOVE biographies, especially auto-biographies. I love feeling as if I am seeing behind-the-scenes. In her first of what I hope will be a long line of books, Schumer really delivers. Vulnerability is probably my favorite trait in a human being, and throughout her book, Schumer is unceasingly, endearingly vulnerable. Schumer also holds my second favorite trait – a wicked sense of humor – which pretty […]

“the potential of nothing is everything”

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

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This book sat on my bedside table for six months. I looked at it every day, tucked it into my work bag on multiple occasions, and brought it with me on several trips but I was unable to open the cover. I was paralyzed by the guilt of being wrapped into the attention economy, and I did not feel like I was ready or able to give my meager time to “nothing” quite yet. I was wrong. I wish I had cracked it open the […]

Let Your Life Be a Counter Friction to Stop the Machine

This is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

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Welcome to the Anthropocene era, the fossil fuel-powered nightmare of our own making. Our hot and crowded planet has hit Defcon 3. Right now, a record number of fires is burning down the Brazilian rainforest, threatening three million endemic plant and animal species. Mass bleaching in the heat-stressed Great Barrier Reef has reduced baby coral by 89% since 2016. Okjökull is the first (but not the last) glacier to disappear from Iceland. Last month Paris hit 109º, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city, […]

“My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.”

Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry

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Michael Ausman is seething. His father has uprooted their family yet again for a job promotion — this time Michael was barely two months into his junior year. Now he is faced with making yet another new group of friends in another new school, and to make matters worse, that school is a Catholic one. Michael is an atheist, and he has no interest in setting down any roots lest they be ripped back out again. But on the first day of school, he is […]



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