Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Inter-Sibling relationships on the National Scale

Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone

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Nancy Goldstone’s Four Queens is the sort of non-fiction I enjoy tucking in to. I travelled last week and wanted a book to read at the airport and on the plane to decompress and scratch the same mental itch as my marathoning Time Team has done (a show which helped me recognize names and places in this book!) and am I ever so glad that I had thought ahead to pack this book as well as Last Night at the Telegraph Club for book club […]

“I knew beyond any doubt that there was genuine value to be found in my story.”

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

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I feel like this is going to be a tough one for me to review, because my relationship with the content that Hannah Gadsby creates is so personal to me and has been frankly crucial to how I am coming to understand myself that it’s a bit difficult to try to take that out of the equation and look at Ten Steps to Nanette on its own. I’ve likely watched Nanette half a dozen times in the past couple of years (and once again in […]

“The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.”

In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

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I can see in this book where everything I loved about The Searcher got its start. However, I am not sad to no longer be in the minds’ eye of Detective Rob Ryan. The narration of In the Woods is entirely in first person, he is telling the reader the story as it happened from somewhere in the near future. He opens the book by announcing that he is an unreliable narrator. It is both true and not, depending on how you define that style […]

“We’re all just trying to be comfortable, and well fed, and unafraid.”

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

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I cried far more often during this 147-page read than I’m strictly comfortable with, but the wise characters in this book would reassure me that my being comfortable with something isn’t a pre-requisite for it having worth. For the first third of this novella, we are with Sibling Dex getting a feel for them and the world they live in. Dex lives on the moon Panga where centuries before the robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, and recoiled from Factory life. They […]

Fourteen Hundred Years of History; Still Uncovering the Women whose Achievements were Hidden.

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World by Shelley Puhak

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I work in Public History, but any good public historian (or historian of any stripe) will tell you that it is nearly impossible to know all eras and areas well. There are inevitable blind spots – you must choose where to apply your limited time. When this year’s Read Harder challenge asked us to read a history about a period you know little about, I was stoked, an excuse to go back further than I normally do and read about some women doing the leading. […]

“Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules. It is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.”

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy

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Happy Women’s History Month in the US. Let’s talk about feminism and burning patriarchy to the ground, shall we? When I read ASKReview’s review of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls in December 2021 I immediately threw it onto my to read list for 2022. A book described succinctly as “a call to action written by a queer woman of color” was absolutely something I want to read. There is much in the world that is fucking awful and the roots of that […]



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