Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sometimes All it Takes is “Good Onya Champ”

Un-cook Yourself: A Ratbag's Rules for Life by Nat's What I Reckon

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I think I’ve made it clear before that I am not someone who is normally drawn to self-help books. I have also mentioned that Audible kind of takes issue with this rather strongly, and insists on throwing suggestions my way. But through either sheer persistence or will, it turns out that one did stick Probably because it is kind of—in part—a piss-take of self-help books anyhow. The other half is a genuine call for you to keep your chin up Champion!—because it is completely normal […]

A gut-punch of a book filled with the stories we rarely hear

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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BINGO – REP (BLACKOUT) I feel that is is important at the start of this review to indicate that I am a non-Hispanic white person. Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a recipient of DACA and a journalist (though she eschews that title, more on that later). For The Undocumented Americans Villavicencio set forth to tell the stories of the undocumented immigrants that we don’t often hear about. She purposefully does not write about DREAMers because she “didn’t want to write anything inspirational.” She wanted to […]

What It Means to Survive

The Night the Lights Went Out by Drew Magary

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Representation. Drew Magary writes about suffering a traumatic brain injury and adjusting to the ill effects of it that left him non-able bodied.  There are very few books I’d recommend to people across my family/friends spectrum. This is one. Perhaps it is one of one. Drew Magary is one of my favorite writers but it sure as hell didn’t start out that way. At Kissing Suzy Kolber, I found him to be a loud-mouthed bully, the kind of guy who thinks […]

Brat Packer Writes Charming Story About Mice

She Was Nice to Mice by Ally Sheedy

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CBR Bingo – Fauna When she was 12 years old, 80s movie star Ally Sheedy wrote the book She Was Nice to Mice about Queen Elizabeth I and a genteel mouse living in her palace. One of the best things about the book is the drawings, which were done by another young woman named Jessica Ann Levy. The cover shown here features Elizabeth and a small mouse dressed in exquisite Elizabethan garb. Adorbs! The story depicts Queen Elizabeth as a fiery, temperamental ruler who loves […]

Whitehead goes for a totally different vibe here–and it works very well

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

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Free: got this new book from my library, which purchased it on my recommendation (and, as always, gets a chunk of change from me at year end as a blanket thank you! libraries are great!) This book started off somewhat slowly for me, which I found surprising since clarity of vision and scene has always stood out to me as one of Whitehead’s strengths. In both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, the setting is almost as important (more important?) than the characters who move about it. […]

The worst part about reading something day 1 is that you have the wait the longest possible length of time to read the next book…

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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Book Club: after I indoctrinated two friends into the Gideon the Ninth world, we all grouped together to read and discuss other books. This was so good my friend had to call us in the middle of the night her time to have an impromptu “Locked Tomb Book Club” meeting. When I was doing my catch up review writing, I thought I was done and then I was just about to congratulate myself on finishing out my backlog of reviews when I sensed that I was […]



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