Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Read How to Build a Girl Instead

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

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Caitlin Moran is a British culture writer/arts reporter/ feminist thinker, and How To Be A Woman is her 2011 memoir/ collection of feminist essays that had been sitting on my shelf for far too long.  How To Be a Woman is structured as both a chronological progression of Moran’s life events and a feminist opinion tied to that event (ie: the first chapter is “I Start Bleeding”, which is both an account of her first period, as well as a discussion on masturbation, women and […]

fun fact: name dropping Joan Didion no less than 45 times in your 270 page book does not make you Joan Didion

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

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You know that dream where you realize that you have been in assigned to a class for an entire semester, but you have never once attended the class? You “wake up” on the day that your final is due and panic, then cobble together whatever previous assignments that you have scattered about that might be able to pass for whatever you were supposed to do in that class? I am fairly sure that’s what happened to Alice Bolin when she woke up one day, book […]

eating vegetables: the essay collection

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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Now here me out: there are lots of reasons to eat vegetables. Sometimes your body is in revolt because you’ve had nothing but pizza all weekend. Sometimes you’ve made a new commitment to “take better care” of yourself. Sometimes you just really want some kale, damn it. Sometimes you just want to smother some broccoli in neon-orange-movie-theater-nacho cheese. Vegetables are good for you, vegetables are tasty, they can be prohibitively expensive- especially if fresh, but sometimes you just have to fight your way through a […]

Didion ain’t no slouch

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of Didion’s essays, previously published in magazines, on a variety of topics with a special interest in California in the 60’s.  The first section, “Lifestyles in the Golden Land”, includes pieces on a murder in San Bernardino, Joan Baez, John Wayne’s last movies, and San Francisco during the summer of love; the next section contains essays on more abstract topics (diary writing, morality, self-esteem); and the third and final section has delves into a broader geography and personal experiences […]

Prairie Home Companion Meets This American Life

The Year of Living Virtuously Weekends Off: A Meditation on the Search for Meaning in an Ordinary Life by Teresa Jordan

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Best for: Those who enjoy very short essays about life in the mid-west US. In a nutshell: Author Jordan uses a (very loose) framing of virtues and vices to tell stories about her life and the lives of others. Worth quoting: “I respect people who keep their promises — when those promises are honorable.” Why I chose it: I thought it was going to be more in line with, say, an A. J. Jacobs book. It was not. Review: I purchased this book long ago, […]

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

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I’ve been wanting to read this for years, and my TBR Jar finally plucked this from the pile. There’s just something about that cheeky title that draws you in, but I never got around to it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the titular piece were very underwhelming. It’s about seven pages long, plus an updated postscript. I wanted a lot more from the ideas the book was titled after. Luckily I at least knew going in that this was an essay collection that would be […]



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