Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]

The Red Knot by Monique Asher

The Red Knot by Monique Asher

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Trigger warning: You hear about rape and at least two scenes show someone who is a kid and a teen about to be raped. “The Red Knot” centers on an isolated town on an island in Alaska. The town has been through some devastating times and it appears they are back. A recent storm has caused some fisherman to be killed. And a local girl has gone missing. […]

“The past is the future”

Obasan by Joy Kogawa

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Cbr17bingo citizen Over the years, I have read a number of books that have dealt with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine were all written from personal, family experiences of that shameful chapter in US history that was left out of history books when I was in school (and is probably being removed from them now). I had never heard of Joy […]

On the Horror of Raising Children in a Messed Up World

When I'm Dead by Hannah Morrissey

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When I’m Dead is the third entry in Hannah Morrissey’s Black Harbor mystery/suspense series. Morrissey calls her genre “Midwestern Noir;” think Scandi Noir, but set in Wisconsin! So far, you can read the Black Harbor books in a standalone fashion. Each story is mostly its own thing, although they all take place in the same city, and occasionally a character will drift from one book into another. Just read them in order, though, don’t be dramatic. This book is about the Winthrop family, and what living […]

Are we the baddies?

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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CBR Bingo: Citizen (the main character is pretty much the “ideal” citizen in her society) I read Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent a few months ago, and I enjoyed it and wanted to try the author’s other works, so I recently picked up Some Desperate Glory, her debut novel. Sometime in the future, Earth has been destroyed by alien technology. Some of the remaining humans inhabit Gaea Station, constructed of old warships, and form a militaristic society where children are born and raised almost solely with the goal […]

A Timeless Play about Love and Gay Life

Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein

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Bingo: Favorite. One of my favorite movies of all time is Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy. I have read the play and loved it too; this is a favorite reread. I moved to San Francisco from New York in 1990 when I was 21 years old. One of my first friends made me dinner one night and showed me his favorite movie, Torch Song Trilogy. It was love at first watch for me. It was so funny and heartbreaking and real. The written play is […]



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