Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Skirts Just Look So Good on Us!

Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

by Leave a Comment

Fashion can say a lot about the people that wear it and the places they occupy in time and space. As such, women starting to wear pants is a shorthand for progress in feminism – but, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell argues, the evolution of skirts over the twentieth century too has plenty to say. Like the author, I wear a lot of dresses and skirts, mostly because they are an easy way to look like you’ve made an effort, and also let you slouch and lounge around […]

“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

by Leave a Comment

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography CBR17 Pie Chart: Education CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens) Official summary: Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic […]

Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

by Leave a Comment

Reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale almost invariably start like a collective trauma memory: where were you when it happened? I was twenty-ish, an English major at a nearby university. I was taught how to analyse literature, but not how to consume it, how to distinguish it, and I don’t think we ever read this one for class. Needless to say, most of my professors were middle-aged men. I did read it, though, and it stuck with me; I read it again a few years later. […]

“You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.” (Bingo)

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

by Leave a Comment

Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book with LGBTQIA-rep CBR17 Bingo: Border (this book is all about a very drawn-out war with borders between the opposing countries constantly changing, depending on who’s currently winning) Spoiler warnings for a 22 year old book. I don’t think I can review it well without revealing some of the more essential plot points. Official plot summary: It began as a sudden strange fancy… Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers […]

Not all men, but certainly a lot of them. Especially rich, white ones.

The Change by Kirsten Miller

by 3 Comments

4.5 stars Buzzwords Cover Challenge 25: Pattern CBR17 Bingo: Red (A book with a red cover) Official plot summary: In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment… After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn’t take long […]

“Remember what you must do when they undervalue you, when they think your softness is your weakness, when they treat your kindness like it is their advantage. You awaken every dragon, every wolf, every monster that sleeps inside of you and you remind them what hell looks like when it wears the skin of a gentle human.”

wild embers: poems of rebellion, fire, and beauty by Nikita Gill

by Leave a Comment

I became interested in Nikita Gill’s poetry when I read an excerpt from her poem “This is Not A Love Poem” and wanted to pick up the book that contained it; this is not that book. That book is The Girl and the Goddess, which I still have to pick up sometime. Thankfully I enjoy Gill’s poetry on the whole. I started out bitterly resenting that this was the wrong book because that meant I would have to buy another of her books; now I […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo