Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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Updated review September 15, 2022:  Re-read this for Cannonballread’s Banned Book week. I did something a bit different for this though. I really just re-read my favorite parts of this book (which there are a lot) but then I also re-watched the movie that came out based on this book. I have to say parts of the movie were very well done, such as when Starr and her mother and others film the police with their phones when her father is being accosted by the […]

CBR Diversions – Unbanned Fiction

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Did you hear about the students and parents in Pennsylvania who banded together to pressure a school board into overturning a ban on books, most of which were written by Black and Brown authors? I looked over the very long list, and then I read the rationale behind the ban. The board believes that the fundamental purpose of school is that of core academics, objective education without indoctrination from any political or social agenda… The racism really jumps out. One thing that struck me, among […]

This One Time, at Banned Camp…

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It’s Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s yearly event to spotlight attempts at censorship. If you have a censorship story to tell, we want to hear it. I come from a bookish people. My parents didn’t restrict my reading in any way and until I hit my tweens, I had never come across the concept of a book being “inappropriate.” At 12, I read well above my age group, within my age group, and was also a big fan of Clifford the Big Red […]

We Like Banned Books and We Cannot Lie

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The list of the American Library Association’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st Century reads like a Best of Cannonball Read list. That’s no surprise, really. With books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men, the Harry Potter series, and our most recent book club selection, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, those lists include many wonderful books that we’ve loved and recommended time and again. From CBR4 in 2012 through the end of August […]



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