Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Please Stop Profiting Off Black Women’s Ideas

Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women's Voices by Katherine Alford, Kathy Gunst

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If Rage Baking is a movement, it’s one that was initially catalyzed by my physical and emotional labor in a major city and in an influential group of people. It is one that was started with the simple act of being kind and encouraging in the darkest of times. I am not at all surprised that my kindness has been overshadowed by the actions of well-intended white women. That my rage and pain has been claimed as their own and their voices centered, uplifted and […]

now is the winter of our discontent

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

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The Party Cloudy Patriot is a loose collection of essays cobbled into a narrative of sorts, and that narrative revolves around patriotism in current political times while framing through the lenses of the past. In this case, Sarah Vowell was living in the fresh hell of 2001; the country was still reeling from the disastrous election cycle that falsely awarded W the win, Clinton’s impeachment was still fresh and Al Gore’s know-it-all pigeonhole could not save the Left, and a day in September changed us in […]

A foreigner, but not from another country.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is the story of J.D. Vance’s mixed upbringing and shows how your family and culture can ‘stick’ to you even when you successfully graduate from a prestigious university education and start a successful career. Early on in the book, Vance explains how his family came to live in Ohio: ‘To my grandparents, the goal was to get out of Kentucky and give their kids a head start.  The kids, in turn, were expected to […]

I think I loved it even more on a re-read

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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My original, and extremely enthusiastic review of this book, can be found here. This was my first re-read (of what I’m sure will be many) and this time, I chose to listen to the audio book. When I first listened to the sample available on Audible, I was honestly not sure if I liked Ramon de Ocampo’s narration, but after seeing the audio book of this highlighted on a bunch of best of the year lists, I decided to give him a chance. Of course, the […]

We built BrisVegas on rock and roll

Pig City by Andrew Stafford

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  Pig City chronicles a brief yet transformative period of Brisbane life, from the 70s through to the 90s, but this is no ordinary history book. The story is told mainly through the lens of music and politics and shows how the two influenced each other in a time when Brisbane was still coming of age.  The ‘BrisVegas’ tag jokingly likens the country town where there’s not much to do (as Brisbane was up until the late eighties) with Las Vegas. Beginning in the seventies, the […]

A Hundred Years On, It Still Mostly Holds Up

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin

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Best for: People interested in a sense of what the Marxist philosophers were saying in the 1900s. Admittedly a niche market at this point (for now, anyway). In a nutshell: The title basically nails it – Lenin argues that Imperialism is Capitalism at its end. Worth quoting: “..for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production.” Why I chose it: It was assigned as part of the Marxist […]



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