Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Everyone’s oil sands are different, and these were mine:” A Masterful Graphic Memoir

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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I’ve been waiting several years to read this as Kate Beaton has been working on it and I’m super happy to say that this was well worth the wait. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a graphic memoir that covers two years that Beaton spent working in the Albertan oil sands. I got Maclean’s for a long time (back when it was weekly!) so I have a good base knowledge about the oil sands and their attendant environmental and social problems. Her nuanced […]

It was always exactly that bad

Not That Bad by Roxane Gay

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] I tend to avoid books like this, because I suppose I’m yet another product of exactly what these essays address: Nothing that has ever happened to me has ever been that bad, and nothing makes that clearer than reading the experiences of others. But that’s the point of collections like these. It is that bad. It’s always been that bad. The fact that we have to consistently work to squash and minimize and fit and qualify and […]

Not for me. #CBRBingo – Debut

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

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This was the first book in a while that my book club didn’t really agree on. We were split down the middle, actually. (I’m glad we’re still doing book club by Zoom but I miss hanging out with my people in person, and I miss all the yummy food. I know everyone misses everyone and everything right now, but I wanted to say it anyway.) If you can’t tell by my rating, I was more on the dislike side of it, though I didn’t hate […]

Ironically titling this review ‘A Good Book’.

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

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This is one of those books that the more it sits with you, the worse you think of it. And I liked the book at first! It’s written in an engaging style, and the characters seem likable at first. It’s also not a long book, so it doesn’t feel like a burden to pick up. I got it as my April pick for Book of the Month, a particularly slim month for interesting choices, so I thought I would branch out a little from my […]

“There is nothing lonelier than fear.”

The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed

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I gave myself two days to read this book, but I didn’t even need that. I started this book at 8:30 PM on Thursday night, and finished it about an hour after I got home from work on Friday. I just couldn’t stop reading it! I was compelled. If I would have been able to read it straight through like I wanted, I probably would have let my book high give this five stars, but it was broken up by sleep and work, so my […]

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

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I’ve been wanting to read this for years, and my TBR Jar finally plucked this from the pile. There’s just something about that cheeky title that draws you in, but I never got around to it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the titular piece were very underwhelming. It’s about seven pages long, plus an updated postscript. I wanted a lot more from the ideas the book was titled after. Luckily I at least knew going in that this was an essay collection that would be […]



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