Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.” (Bingo)

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

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Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book with LGBTQIA-rep CBR17 Bingo: Border (this book is all about a very drawn-out war with borders between the opposing countries constantly changing, depending on who’s currently winning) Spoiler warnings for a 22 year old book. I don’t think I can review it well without revealing some of the more essential plot points. Official plot summary: It began as a sudden strange fancy… Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers […]

One For The Culture

The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture by Grace Perry

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: culture. This is a collection of essays about queerness and pop culture.  I’m a few years older than the author so I experienced some of her references differently but I loved this collection of essays form Grace Perry. She perfectly captures a late-generation millennial’s experience with sexuality at a time when things were slowly starting to change. And with the reflections about Gossip Girl and Katy Perry, her willingness to be vulnerable about her growth, how difficult it was, and […]

Room Mates

Make Room For Love by Darcy Liao

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: Recommendation. This was recommended to me at a romance bookstore when I was looking for sapphic romance tales with trans MCs. We’re in an age where the formerly established fact of multicultural democracy is becoming unsettled. And as such, more stories by gay, queer, trans, enby creatives are going to be going by the wayside. You’ll probably still have “the table” at Barnes & Noble as the bookstore tries to cash in on branding writers by their identity more […]

All My Life Is Changing Every Day…

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks

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Read as part of CBR17Bingo: reread. I’m replacing the reread square with a free one here because I enjoyed this book, wanted to write about it and it doesn’t fit neatly into another category. When I was a kid, we didn’t have those conflabbed Hunger Games and young adult fantasy trilogies. We had Goosebumps and Babysitters Club and Matthew Christopher. We had real books, ones that were short and easy to digest, ones that didn’t touch on heavier themes beyond Being a kid sucks. This book […]

Take a look. It’s in a book.

Rough Pages by Lev A.C. Rosen

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  This is the third book in the Evander Mills mystery series. Evander “Andy” Mills is a disgraced former cop turned private investigator who takes on cases for members of the local gay community who can’t go to the police. In this story, Andy investigates the missing proprietors of a gay friendly book shop along with their mailing list, which could ruin the lives of a lot of his friends and loved ones. In addition to the mystery, we see Andy learn to live (somewhat) […]

“If I could be who you wanted / All the time”

You Wanna Be on Top? A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model (2025) by Sarah Hartshorne

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Bingo square: Border. This memoir is about the blurriness of the border between the real and fake, mainly on what we call reality television, but also within trauma-inflected memory. The way I ate this up, as the youth who were born after Sarah Hartshorne’s stint on America’s Next Top Model (2007) would say. Of course, said youth would immediately identify the toxicity of the show (which took me well over a decade to figure out) and make a pithy 8-second TikTok call-out–although they might also […]



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