Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

by 3 Comments

#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books recommended by friends Elizabeth Zott is a chemist struggling to be taken seriously by her male colleagues at a lab in the 1960s. She never completed her degree because her academic advisor raped her, but her lack of degree in no way means she’s not intelligent. Despite her brilliant mind, her male co-workers either treat her as nothing more than a lab assistant or steal her research and present it as their own. The one exception to this is Calvin Evans, […]

50 Years of Feminism

50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution by Katherine Spillar, Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem

by Leave a Comment

Seminal articles, pieces of fiction, and letters to the editor compiled from fifty years’ worth of Ms. magazine provide us with a glimpse into the last half-century of the feminist movement. For someone living in the 21st century, I have a hefty digital collection of midcentury magazines. I find it fascinating to immerse myself in the minutiae of such a different period, seeing how the world was expected to look at the time. I even like reading the advertisements! I haven’t read any old editions of […]

Two Takes on Religion and Politics

Life On the Fringes by Haviva Ner-David

Take This Bread by Sara Miles

by Leave a Comment

                                                        CBR15Bingo: Politics (feminism, inter-community politics, personal politics) Both of these texts engage with what religion means to the writer and how they engage with their religious communities with a more radical and transformative mindset. Reading them in close succession was an interesting look into how feminist, progressive religious women struggle to find their place within structured organizations. However, they are coming from two very different faith traditions and two very different personalities as well. As someone who reacts strongly with the personality of the […]

Blancaflor and all the sh*t wives have to do

Blancaflor, The Hero with Secret Powers: ​A Folktale from Latin America by Nadja Spiegelman and Sergio García Sánchez

by 1 Comment

Blancaflor is a folktale with Spanish and Latin American roots from a category of folktales called “Girl helps the hero flee.”  High John the Conqueror is an African-American version you may have read in Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly. In this type of folktale, a man ends up being captured by a devil or magician, and has to complete a series of impossible tasks. But the devil/magician’s daughter falls for the hero, and helps him complete the tasks and escape with his life. TOON […]

To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before!

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush

by Leave a Comment

CBR 15 Bingo – Strange Worlds: The titular six (and I) jet off to the strange worlds of NASA and outer space in this book. It was many years after the inception of NASA and the space flight program that women were allowed to become astronauts. Though not all of these initial six women are household names today, they all worked to advance both space exploration and women’s rights in their own ways. It rather surprises me that I’m not very interested in space exploration – […]

Who would I get to be if I got to create my life from a place of dreaming and not always resistance?

All the Black Girls are Activists by EbonyJanice Moore

by Leave a Comment

First, if you haven’t already, go follow EbonyJanice Moore on Instagram and then go pre-order or buy All the Black Girls Are Activists. Secondly, I am a middle-aged white woman who is working on unlearning white supremacy, so this book was not written for me. Regardless, I got a lot out of reading this, and I think other white and non-Black people will too. Purely as a reading experience, All the Black Girls are Activists: A Fourth Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance is a joy. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo