Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“With everyone working together and recognizing each other’s humanity, we will all get to space someday, and we will all have enough.”

Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Delliquanti

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This was another great purchase courtesy of the new YA graphic novel section at my Barnes & Noble! Across a Field of Starlight has everything I want in a book — thoughtful science fiction, an examination of what growing up in a traumatic situation of deprivation vs growing up in a utopian commune situation does to you, interrogation of colonialism, mental health, trans and queer characters (one of the main characters has the pansexual pride flag tattooed on their arm!), body diversity, etc, etc, etc… […]

Six Drinks and A Few Empires

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

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I need to clean off my coffee table. I remembered something from A History of the World in 6 Glasses, but then couldn’t find the book to confirm it. I figured maybe I’d finished it way earlier than I thought and had given it away. But no, it was just buried under stuff on the coffee table. Turns out, I hadn’t quite finished it either. The premise is a history of cultural development around the world as it connects to the general history of the […]

Stolen History

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

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Going into Unfamiliar Fishes, my knowledge of Hawaii was sparse, to say the least. I can’t say that we covered any Hawaiian history in school- not even that it is our “newest” state. Information came in fits and starts; a friend of mine teaches Hula through VSA, I was familiar with Captain Cooks adventures (and one serious misadventure) in the archipelago, and I caught an old episode of No Reservations. Embarrassing, I know. I had nothing to write home about. Enter Sarah Vowell and her “almost oral […]

Oh, Imperialism….

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  Somehow I never heard about this book until I read Sir Pratchett’s non-fiction where he references it. I don’t know how I could have missed this awesome story, but I’m glad I picked it up to read on vacation. In normal Pratchett fashion, it’s hilarious, provocative, and deep. In happenstance, it was also interesting to read about a small island nation that gets hit with a hurricane while vacationing in a small island nation that narrowly missed a hurricane. “Nation” encompasses two interlocking stories, […]

A sci-fi adventure on the evils of imperialism

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After reading and loving the Silo trilogy by Howey, I went back to look for others of his works, and found Half-Way Home to be a fascinating and well-done novel in its own right. It is the story of a group of 15-year-olds who had been raised in artificial wombs aboard a spaceship, one of hundreds of such missions sent out from a future Earth to find and colonize viable planets. Missions landing on nonviable planets were abruptly aborted by the artificial intelligence (AI) controlling […]

A Feminist Post-Colonial Coming of Age Story

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Set in the US in 1969, Lucy is the story of a 19-year-old who has just moved from the British West Indies for work and school. She becomes an au pere for an affluent family with 4 daughters and attends school briefly for nursing. This novel is her reflection on that year and on herself. One could read it as a sort of coming of age story, about growing up. Lucy is trying to break from her old life and especially from her mother with […]



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