Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Must everybody fail this poor kid?

Colin Fischer by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz

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Another in the list of books I looked into simply in the hopes of finding decent autistic representation. What I got was… passable, I guess? Colin Fischer tells the story of a high-school kid on the autism spectrum (specifically, he’s diagnosed with the now-outdated “Asperger’s syndrome”) who goes to a regular high school with zero accommodations made for him and is relentlessly bullied by both his peers and his own younger brother (in a cruel twist of fate, given how instantly excited and in love […]

The Curious Incident of the Convoluted Plot

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

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My thoughts on this book are… messy. On one hand, it is refreshing to see a book narrated entirely by a character with ASD. On the other hand, Haddon did not research prior to writing the book, saying “imagination trumps research.” Plus, the novel doesn’t even commit to the diagnosis. There exist many undiagnosed kids and adults, but it felt peculiar in these particular circumstances that Christopher, our narrator, never even has the possibility floated. On one hand, what Christopher puts up on the regular, such as […]

But honestly, I think they are…

All Cats Are On the Autism Spectrum by Kathy Hoopmann

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This is the book my one sister says she used to help her daughter understand her brother’s autism, since she loves cats. It’s funny because I’d had more or less the same thought as the title of this book, going so far as to google variations of it, numerous times. The thought occurred to me that it seemed like people on the spectrum, children especially, tended to gravitate towards cats more than dogs, and my brain went from that thought to “well, naturally, because they’re […]

Here goes…

The Autistic Brain: Thinking across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek

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For the sake of transparency, I guess I should delve briefly into why I went down the autism rabbit hole that led me to reading this book. It all started with occasional “maybe you are autistic” jokes from my fiancee that I brushed off. Over time, particularly after watching multiple seasons of both versions of Love on the Spectrum, among other things, a reassessment began that brought me to the conclusion that there was likely something to those jokes. I saw some of myself in […]

“I knew beyond any doubt that there was genuine value to be found in my story.”

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

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I feel like this is going to be a tough one for me to review, because my relationship with the content that Hannah Gadsby creates is so personal to me and has been frankly crucial to how I am coming to understand myself that it’s a bit difficult to try to take that out of the equation and look at Ten Steps to Nanette on its own. I’ve likely watched Nanette half a dozen times in the past couple of years (and once again in […]

Protect Molly at all costs

The Maid by Nita Prose

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  I don’t often take recommendations; generally, I prefer to find my books more organically, especially since my tastes are a bit all over the place, even more than with other types of media. You might think me weird, finicky, or downright contrarian, but it’s not like I try to be. I just know what I like when I actually see it; I give most potential books a first sentence/paragraph/page test, seeing if they grab my attention right out of the gates, because they probably […]



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