Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I do not want to be protected. I want to be safe.”

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy

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What are ways that women are not supposed to be? What are they not supposed to do? Mona Eltahawy interrogates social behavioral control of women and non-binary people through the framing of seven types of behavior that are understood to be in some way improper. Anger, Attention, Profanity, Ambition, Power, Violence, and Lust. In Seven Necessary Sins Elthawy asks one of the most important questions – Who does this benefit? The author argues not only that women and girls should engage in activities driven by […]

Norway 1620, France 1731, Pennsylvania 1929, Lesotho 1948…

Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson

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This is the story of many women and men from across the centuries and around the world who have been tried for witchcraft, and the often surprising historical currents that led them there, and influenced whether they would be allowed to live or die. I was born about an hour away from Salem, Massachusetts, though I never went to visit until 2019. Of course I went in October, which is the absolute peak of their tourist station, and battled my way through a crowded open […]

Big time feminism

Giantess: The Story of the Girl Who Traveled the World in Search of Freedom by JC Deveney

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I saw the online reader copy for Giantess: The Story of the Girl Who Traveled the World in Search of Freedom ages ago. And didn’t get to it because I had others I wanted to read first, plus I lost the link for a while, but then a new one appeared in Edelweiss. The cover seemed to make this Jean-Christophe Deveney/JC Deveney graphic novel have a particular theme, but went a slightly different way. I assumed we would find an outcast who would find how […]

CBR15 Bingo: Africa (Triple Bingo and Blackout)

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamande Ngozi Adichie

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CBR15 Bingo: Africa Not going to lie, I originally planned to read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, but as we were nearing the end of October and I had this last square to complete on my Cannonball Bingo card, I decided to be strategic and read something rather shorter instead. Hence this essay, which I’m ashamed to say is the first thing I’ve actually read by Ms. Adichie. Do I own all three of her novels in e-book form? I do indeed. Should I read them […]

“Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me”

The Hours Before Dawn (1958) by Celia Fremlin

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In the autumn of 2011, I played Bella Manningham in an amateur dramatic production of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 thriller Gas Light, which has given its name to the practice of deliberately undermining someone’s conception of their own sanity for selfish or sinister purposes. Bella is the wife who sees lights flicker, whose things won’t stay where she left them, who is increasingly convinced that she is disappearing deeper and deeper into her own mad mind.  “You mustn’t go on lying here in the dark, or […]

Does *not* do what it says on the tin. Where be the witches?

In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial by Mona Chollet

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 3 Book 11/30 This one was frustrating! The title absolutely is misleading. The only witches you will get in this book are in the introduction, and in Carmen Maria Machado’s foreword. So if you find yourself digging those two parts just brace yourself that’s not what the rest of the book is like. To be fair, for the most part I found the rest of the book interesting and never wanted to stop reading it, but I came for […]



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