Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

To all the stable geniuses out there, this one’s for you

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

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I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds the reviews the hardest part of the Cannonball Reads. I read 44 books last year but only managed to review 17 of them. I’m aiming for the full 52 again this year, but this is, I think, the fifth time [ETA it is the sixth] I’ve tried and failed a full Cannonball? It’s harder to create than it is to consume. It’s also easier to tear down than it is to build. It’s easy to write […]

“Our humanity is worth a little discomfort, it’s actually worth a lot of discomfort.”

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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I wish I felt better so I could really give So You Want to Talk About Race what it deserves, review-wise. The short review is if you haven’t already read this, you need to. Maybe you are like me and put it on your TBR right after its publication in 2018 and then it fell slowly down the list. Maybe you saw it on all of the recommended reading lists that proliferated in summer 2020 (A Reading List on Race for Allies, Antiracist Reading, Understanding […]

“We must stop confusing bullies with leaders.”

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

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Reading this book puts me in the mind of what I’ve seen on TV of going to one of those televised evangelical church sessions where you pay someone to slap you in the face to cure you of cancer, only instead of a conman trying to steal people’s money, it’s an intelligent woman giving me the words to express frustrations I’ve never been able to properly explain and it is so cathartic it almost  feels like an out of body experience. Plot (yes, I’m calling […]

Anything But

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

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What are we doing—we’re constantly holding up the mediocre white man as the standard and then bending to it at the detriment of good ideas, fairness, and equity. Mediocre is a must read. It was inappropriate to yell “Yes!” after every sentence, but that’s how I felt. In some ways, it’s telling you what you already know, but it’s also explaining how deep the problem really is and also affirming that no, it’s not just you. I remember so clearly arguing with my brother when […]

I would push this book on anyone.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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One of these days I will find a way to successfully and reliably write reviews for books that mean a lot to me, but that is not this day. This day, I’m going to half-ass some things about this awesome book I read last month but have been avoiding reviewing. A thing that I can say with confidence is that the audio version is great. Somehow I’ve never listened to a book narrated by Bahni Turpin before, but she was fantastic, and I hope she […]

More Essential Reading

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power by Ijeoma Oluo

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Best for: All the people, but I think white men really need to read and sit with this one. In a nutshell: Author Oluo explores the ways in which the elevation of the mediocrity of white men harms everyone (including white men). Worth quoting: “What I’m saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” “How can white men be our born […]



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