Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Tales of a Queer Cross Country Road Trip

Real Queer America by Samantha Allen

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Review 1 for Bingo (Own Voices): Here’s the scenario for Real Queer America: A transgender reporter and a friend/scribe take a trip across the American Southwest, South, and the Midwest to document LGBTQ lives and history. Along the way, old friends are visited, new ones made, memories evaluated, and research is done. Two things surprised me about this book: first, how deeply researched it is (I will be looking up some of the historical and theoretical references cited), and second, how hopeful it is about […]

American Like Me, American Like You

American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures by America Ferrera (editor)

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Badkittyuno reviewed this one and I immediately put it on my to read, and then picked it up at my first chance from Audible. American Like Me is a collection of 32 stories about what being American, whether they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. Some of the authors have written previously, others have not, but America Ferrera gathered a wide variety of voices to capture a breadth of experiences. This book is full of the stories about life between cultures. The […]

“We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.”

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

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I only learned that Laurie Halse Anderson wrote her modern classic and much challenged novel Speak in response to her own rape as a young teen. But where Melinda came to art to find her voice, Anderson came to writing. Anderson writes in verse that runs the gambit of emotion and holds no punches.  It is a memoir of her full life, opening with a reflection on her father, whose severe PTSD sets the tone for her complicated home (later reflected in her YA fiction The […]

Evolution is a fickle bitch

I'm Just a Person by Tig Notaro

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I  set out to learn about Tig Notaro when she appeared on Star Trek: Discovery as the dry, hyper-confident engineer Jet Reno. I love this character so much that I went down the Tig Notaro rabbit hole and discovered she does not disappoint, and is possibly the only person worthy of depicting Jet Reno. I chose to do the audiobook version of her memoir, in part because I love her dry-Daria like delivery and wish I could truly perfect my like-I-give-a-fuck-about-emoting-monotone like she has. If […]

When White Allies are Enemies

Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson

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Full title: Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even There Edited by Henry Louse Gates, Jr. with an Afterword by Barbara A. White In the early 1980s, the eminent scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., established that the 1859 novel entitled “Our Nig” was in fact written by an African American woman named Harriet E. Wilson. Previously, it had been assumed that the story was written by a white woman but […]

A surprisingly educational celebrity autobiography

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

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In this very engaging autobiography, Trevor Noah opens up about growing up in South Africa, born from a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time when this was literally a crime punishable with several years in prison. The Apartheid regime ended while Noah was still young, but his childhood was still deeply affected by the fact that he was a mixed race child in a society where the races were not supposed to mix at all, to the point where his […]



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