Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Everyone’s oil sands are different, and these were mine:” A Masterful Graphic Memoir

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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I’ve been waiting several years to read this as Kate Beaton has been working on it and I’m super happy to say that this was well worth the wait. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a graphic memoir that covers two years that Beaton spent working in the Albertan oil sands. I got Maclean’s for a long time (back when it was weekly!) so I have a good base knowledge about the oil sands and their attendant environmental and social problems. Her nuanced […]

Beware Windigo

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

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You know how there’s that trope in the end of the world book where the city folk go up north, usually at the end of the book, to find a new place to live? They’re expecting it to be quiet, or full of people who just live off the land, and yet curiously no one ever seems to meet a First Nations person? I’ve long thought about that and what happens when the city folk start to migrate north. This book actually approaches the question […]

If this book had a face, I would punch it

Foe by Iain Reid

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I have got to stop believing the hype around anyone declared Canada’s next big author. I just have to stop doing that for like, my mental health. CanLit is so desperate to have a big thing like Atwood again that they will throw that title around like a stick for a dog, and I, ever the faithful hound, will chase after it. But it’s a stick, not a rabbit, and a stick is ultimately wooden, predictable and boring; like this fucking book. Where do I […]

A warm cozy blanket of a book

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I resolved to read something I had not read before for This Old Thing, and Goodreads gave me a list of recommended books that are over 100 years old. I picked The Scarlet Pimpernel, because it is famous and important and written by a woman. It turns out that I do not have the reading fortitude I had in university, and I just couldn’t get into it. Despite having promised myself to not do re-reads for CBR10 Bingo, I felt like reading something warm and […]

Women talking, getting comfortable with anger

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I picked up Miriam Toews’ newest novel, Women Talking, in the airport recently. I felt very lucky because it ticked so many boxes for me – I had run out of reading material on a work trip so really needed a book, it was in those new resell displays at the news stand so it was discounted enough to get through my NO NEW BOOK PURCHASES embargo, it fits with my vow to read more Canadian literature, and it was published in 2018. Toews has […]

I should have enjoyed this more than I did

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This book feels like it is right up my alley – it’s written a Canadian author, it’s clever and well thought out, there is humour, it was nominated for Canadian literature awards. It’s BAIT, but I just struggled to force myself through it after it sitting on my TBR pile for two years. The narrator here is a 500 year old parrot named Aaron, telling the part of his life story he values the most. He tells of “his shoulder,” a young Jewish man named […]



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