Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

1880s romance and human rights

Renegade Girls by Nora Neus and Julie Robine

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When I started the Nora Neus and Julie Robine graphic novel, Renegade Girls, I was not enjoying it. Things felt too simple, romanticized, not original and terribly slow paced. I already knew the ending. Or so I thought. Granted, there was the obvious ending (if you are paying attention) but things did not take the obvious path to get there. We have a realistic look at the troubles of the factor workers and we see the ugly but it is not gratuitous. In fact, if […]

My Name Is Brave

My Name Is Brave: LGBTQIA+ by William Anthony

My Name Is Brave: The Environment by William Anthony

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My Name Is Brave: LGBTQIA+  by William Anthony (due January 2025) is a nice book and a good introduction on LGBT+ issues, but it has been done before. You could find this information in almost any book on the subject. However, the addition of showing how the reader can partake in helping this or another cause they need to be brave for, is good.  The mixture of photographs and drawing bring to life a handful of advocates. In a few pages each we see a transgender […]

Meaningful conversations

Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire by Jehad Abusalim

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Full disclosure, I did not finish Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing and Mike Merryman-Lotze. I did read a few of the essays in full, a few I skimmed and one was mostly read. There are around five or so poems, but they did not “pop” for me.  There are a handful of  photographs and each essay covers events, detailed facts and much more. It is a technical read a lot of the time. While the publisher’s description […]

“Can’t you understand that, when you have to be careful all the time, it’s dreadful to see things like that being accepted? They’re not even alive.” Pratchett’s Look at Oppression and Personhood

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

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I’m a Discworld fan but have never done a complete read of all the books, and so my experience has been a bit chaotic in reading these. I picked this up on a trip randomly and just got around to it a few months later, so another entry in my piecemeal approach to Pratchett’s work. Often times my big grand plans like that end up coming face to face with reality (and the monetary cost of buying 40 books), but sometimes the slow and steady […]

The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

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This short, deeply smart collection of essays is really important. Seriously, “Men Explain Things to Me” resonated with me on every level. It’s a perfect gut-check… when some (most) men imply that I’m not entitled to articulate my own experience… when some (most) men cut me off in conversation about a topic on which I’m an authority because they have a couple of thoughts about it… when colleges and universities respond to reports of rape by instituting curfews and behavioral guidelines for women… when my […]

How did we get human rights?

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This semester I am taking a graduate class on the history of human rights. It has been fantastic even though snow has interrupted it twice now. One of our first books was Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt. She examines the language of human rights as it emerged with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Declaration of Independence. She argues that before and during that time period we see a change in thinking and a rise in empathy towards other people. This coincided […]



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