Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Practical Advice That We Need Now

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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Best for: Everyone interested in combating white supremacy. In a nutshell: Author Ijeoma Oluo offers practical advice for ways to engage in conversations — and actions — to combat systemic racism. Worth quoting: SO MUCH. But some of my favorites include: “White Supremacy is this nation’s oldest pyramid scheme. Even those how have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.” “I think about every black and brown person, every queer person, every disabled person, who […]

Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning

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The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]

Black girl poetic magic

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Electric Arches is collection of poetry by Eve L. Ewing. Her poems muse on the black experience. She reveals painful moments of racism she encounters and add in handwritten font her imagined replies to the N-word. She writes odes to her musical heroes in “Appletree [on black womanhood, from and to Erykah Badu] and “On Prince”. Each poem describes how their music touched her soul. She uplifts the ordinary with her words adding a fantastical gloss of wonder. “so in this world, grease is a compliment, no […]

I wish my younger self could have read this book.

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First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing.  He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power.  If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates.  Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him.  For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]

“Look, I know I’ve been joking around a lot, but it’s only to keep from being sad.”

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I’ve been volunteering at my local library, and shelving books has taken me into unfamiliar territory: the nonfiction section! (dun dun duuuuuuun!) Since I’ve been attempting to read stuff by non-white non-men lately anyway, when I found this on my cart to return to the shelves, I decided to keep it for myself. I’m glad I did – Phoebe is a delight. The book is organized into general essay sections, but she rambles a bit, which makes it all much more conversational and easy to […]

The Banality of Racism

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

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Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and winner of many other literary prizes. It is a series of reflections written as poetry on racism in its many forms, from childhood through adulthood, from everyday personal experiences to those that make national news. Rankine, with precise and evocative language, provides a series of images with words that demonstrate the relentlessness and predictability of racism in America […]



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