Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Drinking a Mug of Male Tears

How to be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings by Sarah Cooper

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  Bingo Notes: This one is my True Story because it’s non-fiction and represents the lives of most women at some point, including myself. This book is both tragic and hilarious. It is a guidebook for getting through office life in The Patriarchy. Sarah outlines what should be great comedy, if it weren’t so very, very true. In fact, I bought this copy for my office while we were having a particularly hard time with the Boys Club aspect. One of my coworkers refused to […]

A Snarky but Serious Look at Pop Culture

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

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Bingo 7 (The Collection) for the diagonal L to R, top to bottom BINGO! I have had Bad Feminist on my physical TBR shelf for some time. I was motivated to read it for the Bingo square, but also because I’m writing a course syllabus for this fall in which I am considering including a section from Bad Feminist. I figure, if I’m going to teach it, I should know the whole thing for context. I have heard a lot about Roxane Gay as a […]

“One should not make a pet out of a wild beast.”

Damsel by Elana K. Arnold

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cbrbingo11 – Cannonballer says! In the kingdom of Harding, heir to the throne Emory must go through the ritual every king has had to take on before being granted the crown: slay a dragon, rescue the damsel captive there, and make her your queen.  Emory conquers this task as he conquers all of his conquests, and the young woman he takes back to his kingdom is like the ones who came before: no memory of her past or her time in the dragon’s lair, nameless, […]

I Don’t Know What to Say

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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This book floored me the other day. First off, thanks to Pajiba for highlighting this book in it’s best of the bunch year for 2018. The Best and Worst of Cannonball 10 article had this book as the best by Mrs. Smith Reads. It looked interesting based on her description, “Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories is nothing short of perfection, and brings everything I was looking for in a year of reading mostly feminist, female-identified, and woman-positive fiction writers.” That sounded right up my alley […]

Take note

Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine

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CBR11bingo The Collection This collection of essays by Emilie Pine was just released in the US but came out to much acclaim in Ireland last year. Pine, who is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin, has written six essays that relate to deeply personal issues for her, but which will resonate with women everywhere. In her author’s note, she writes that these essays began with a family crisis. Once the crisis passed,  …I discovered that I was still lost, still trying to […]

Male as the default human

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

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Our world is run on data. From the economy to healthcare to education we use numbers to allocate resources and make decisions. But there’s a blindspot in our data, and it’s huge: gender. Data doesn’t take women into account and uses men as the default human, leading to bias and discrimination across the board. Women pay for this bias in time, in money, and often with their lives. Caroline Criado Perez has gathered as much data as possible (often difficult because such data doesn’t always […]



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