Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Love what you do, how you do it, and the body you do it in

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown (Editor)

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Woof. I have been reading a lot of really amazing critical work this year and a lot of it has been just for fun. Also, a lot of it makes me feel like my brain is exploding but in a way that feels really really good to me, and I think Adrienne Maree Brown would approve.   Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by Adrienne Maree Brown, is a collection of essays, interviews, and other writing by Brown as well as a series of […]

Looking for a great debut fiction novel? Look no further! (Belated Bingo – Book Club)

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

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Well hello there. I am well beyond in my reading goal AND with my reviews AND missed my chance to bingo (insert dramatic sigh). But I’m going to keep on truckin’ for my own personal benefit with my bingo board (because it’s fun!) and will chalk it up to the nightmare that is 2020 collateral damage. ONWARD! (I’m not tagging the reviews, just including what my Belated Bingo category was in the title). This book is in the Book Club category for me because a […]

I identified with this one so much I wrote the author a thank you letter!

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

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I don’t know the writer of this book, but in some ways I feel that I do. Author Joanne McNeil and I discovered the internet at the same time, as we were working out our own tween identities. Both of our families got on AOL in the mid-90s. We tinkered around with chat rooms, played with websites, clicked around just to see where we could go. As we got older we meandered into the blogosphere, finding like-minded people, ever updating blogrolls. We tinkered with MySpace […]

A foreigner, but not from another country.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is the story of J.D. Vance’s mixed upbringing and shows how your family and culture can ‘stick’ to you even when you successfully graduate from a prestigious university education and start a successful career. Early on in the book, Vance explains how his family came to live in Ohio: ‘To my grandparents, the goal was to get out of Kentucky and give their kids a head start.  The kids, in turn, were expected to […]

We built BrisVegas on rock and roll

Pig City by Andrew Stafford

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  Pig City chronicles a brief yet transformative period of Brisbane life, from the 70s through to the 90s, but this is no ordinary history book. The story is told mainly through the lens of music and politics and shows how the two influenced each other in a time when Brisbane was still coming of age.  The ‘BrisVegas’ tag jokingly likens the country town where there’s not much to do (as Brisbane was up until the late eighties) with Las Vegas. Beginning in the seventies, the […]

Myth, history and culture collide

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Ho Lin’s short story anthology was an interesting read. Each tale aimed to shed light on random moments from varying points of view. He pulls in the reader with unexpected juxtapositions of settings and tone. The collection exudes emotion as if the stories were collective memories meshed together. He rarely delves deep into any specific narratives. The stories bounced between Asia and American even within the same story. We meet an American ex-Pat in China, then a host of characters in San Francisco, while another […]



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