Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Does this author ever write a bad book?

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel

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Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel This graphic novel is not perfect, but it is darn close. There were just one or two small “bumps” for me. But overall fans will get a huge kick out of this. There is much happening and Bechdel uses their usual wit and observations to get the job done. Even if they cannot get the job of writing their new book or the TV script done. It is life during the years of 2020 to “now” (or around […]

Kind of a Miserable Home, Actually

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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Alison Bechdel is perhaps best known for the Bechdel Test, a measure of representation of women in media. (For those who don’t know, the test asks whether a particular work features more than one woman, whether those women have a conversation with one another, and whether that conversation centers around a topic other than a man.) But Alison Bechdel is also a cartoonist who created a long-running cartoon strip and two graphic novel memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was her first graphic memoir, and […]

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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CBR 16 Bingo – Pride: LGBTQ+ author “I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy” I read this book for my book club in June, for pride month, since we try to plan our books in acordance to the different heritage months. We also try to have diversity in the types of books we choose, and we hadn’t had a graphic novel yet this year, so we ended up settling on Fun Home as our book. […]

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic had been on my to read for a bit as one of the more visible challenged and banned books since its publication in 2006  (31st most challenged  in the decade 2010-2019 according to the ALA) that I hadn’t gotten to yet, but moved higher up as it was challenged locally to me twice since 2020 (it’s been retained both times). So, it found its way to my September reading as my personal choice for Banned Books Week 2024.   As […]

Comics and exercising: the perfect combination

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

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I saw The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) by Alison Bechdel on NPR’s Best Books List and was immediately intrigued. I’d already read the graphic memoir, Fun House, by Bechdel, which I enjoyed, but this one seemed right up my alley. I have a hard time describing Bechdel’s graphic memoirs because they’re such an interesting mix of genres. You have the cartoon element, the deeply personal stories, and the mix of literature review and biography thrown in as well. In Superhuman Strength, Bechdel discusses a number of writers, including Ralph Waldo […]

A Brilliant Graphic Memoir

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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I moved to San Francisco from New York in 1990. One of the ways I fell in love with the City was by voraciously reading the newspapers. There were two regular newspapers, one a morning edition and one that was published in the afternoon. There were also free papers like The Bay Guardian, similar to the Village Voice in NY. In one of the free papers–I can’t remember which now–there was a cartoon Dykes to Watch Out For, drawn by Alison Bechdel. It was funny […]



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