Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Black AF History: Boring…AF? (Or Maybe Just Hard To Read)

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

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I will come right out of the gate and say I approached this book the wrong way. I thought it was going to be more of a straight-through read, and it’s definitely something to read in chunks instead. Otherwise everything gets overwhelming and your brain just…shuts down. So perhaps for someone who didn’t try to power through it in a few weeks, or maybe even for someone who listened to the audiobook in its entirety, this book wasn’t…Boring AF. But I definitely found myself wandering […]

All That She Carried – a powerful and important book

All That She Carried by Tiya Miles

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What can a simple sack tell us about the past? As it turns out, an absolutely incredible amount. Sometime in the 1850s, a slave named Rose sent her daughter Ashley out of South Carolina to escape slavery with a sack that contained a tattered dress, 3 handfuls of pecans, a braid of her mom’s hair and love. With these talismanic items, Ashley (who was still a child) was able to escape the hellish conditions of the South to freedom in the North. How do we […]

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”

Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly

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I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I did. It was just okay. Very informative; kind of dull. I feel like a big jerk saying I liked the movie better, but I liked the movie better. I know this is an unfair comparison because the movie takes just a portion of the information in here and dramatizes it, but it’s the best bit, and the compelling narrative and much easier to follow cast of characters just makes for better story. Yes, […]

Caste – A book that may change how you view society

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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There are books one reads for pleasure or diversion. There are books one will read for school or for work. Then, there are some books one reads because they are important and can provide new insights into the world. Caste falls into the latter category. I read this because a close friend asked me to do so, she was putting together a group to discuss the book and asked me to join (and I honestly felt flattered by the request, considering the intellects of the […]

Food and socially conscious history together; I wish I would have liked it more.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 11/30 I’m feeling like a dick on this one, but I didn’t have the reading experience I was hoping for with such glowing reviews. I didn’t hate it, or even dislike it, but I didn’t really like it all that much either. I had two main problems here. The first may or may not have been exacerbated by the second, but as of right now, I have no way of knowing. Before I get to my issues, this book […]

I can see why she won the Pulitzer for this, but it wasn’t completely to my tastes.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

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I’m really glad I did the audio version for this one, because I’m not sure my raccoon brain (shiny things only!) would have had the patience to sit through it otherwise, and it’s worth sitting through. Robin Miles is, as always, a great narrator. This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, either. I had actually never learned about the Great Migration in all my many (many) years of school, which is not really surprising, but is disheartening, so I was excited to get into […]



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