Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If you want to read a book that makes you sorry you read it, but in a good way, this is for you.

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

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Riot Baby is one of those books that you really cannot talk about. And yet, of course, you must. But if you do, you tell the whole story. It is raw. It is gritty. It is gut wrenching. But if you do not, people will miss out on something…… maybe special; maybe horrible; maybe great; maybe…. I will leave it up to you to decide. As you follow Ella and Kev through South Central, Harlem, Rikers Island and back to Watts, Tochi Onyebuchi will make […]

A book to experience, but you are not always glad you did.

Man-Eaters Volume 1 by Chelsea Cain

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I was not sure what Man-Eaters Volume 1 was going to be about by the cover. But since it was in the children’s/young adult section I figured it could not be too bad. Okay, maybe a few big cats or dogs or some funny-looking “scary” monster were going to attack people but nothing I hadn’t seen before. Just a thriller story. There was a “funny-looking scary monster” all right. It is called the Female Teenager. Chelsea Cain and various illustrators created a graphic novel series […]

The most beautiful book about the end of the world you’ll ever read

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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When I read that Station Eleven would be a book club read, I decided to borrow it from my local library. I wasn’t familiar with it, but I knew that it came recommended by many in the CBR community. I had no idea this book would be so beautiful and so moving, the first book I’ve read in 2020 that I truly love. Station Eleven is the story of our world before and after its collapse as the result of a pandemic so devestating that […]

A fitting amuse bouche to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (in it’s various incarnations)

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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The Testaments is the hotly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, told by Atwood through the voices of three women intimately acquainted with the Gilead regime. It aims to answer the lingering question that many readers had after The Handmaid’s Tale – what brought about the oppressive regime’s collapse? Many words have been written here and all over the internet about this sequel. Was it needed? Is it just a cash-grab? My opinion on the ‘necessity’ of The Testaments is that it is an amuse […]

The Power, by Naomi Alderman (A belated start to CBR11)

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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    I’ve been stuck in a weird reading hiatus recently. Weird for me because I’m normally the type of nerd who considers it bragging rights if I make it to 50 books in year. It’s an identity point for better or worse. However, for a lot reasons, (most of them uninteresting) I just…stopped for about a year and a half. I’m not completely sure what happened to all the time that I used to spend reading (Twitter definitely played more of a role than […]

The Effects of Misogyny – From A(twood) to Z(umas)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

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So apparently real life isn’t depressing and dystopian enough, so I made June my month to read (and re-read) books that construct an all too believable future for women and their reproductive rights. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was my book club’s pick for June and though I don’t know if I would use the phrase “looking forward to it” to describe how I felt about re-reading this novel, I was definitely curious to revisit it.  I read the book about a year after it […]



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