Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”

My Life in France by Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme

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The story of Julia Child’s years in France in her own words was literally the second book I put on my Goodreads to read list in January 2012. It has taken me this long to get to it, but I’m perfectly happy to have waited until I was in the right mood – even though this book made me hungry every time I picked it up. My Life in France is exactly what the title says it is. For most people the contents of this […]

“People bury the parts of history they don’t like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers.”

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

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Thrillers aren’t usually my genre. Is that why When No One Is Watching is good but not great for me? Possibly. But we read out of our comfort zones on purpose so that maybe the next one is better, or that we’re more ready for it. This is another book that hopped to the front of the to read line based on this year’s Read Harder Challenge which has a task specifically for reading a political thriller by a marginalized author and this fits the […]

“This – not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture – is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.”

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

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On 2022’s Read Harder Challenge Task 6 is to read a non-fiction YA comic. Each year when the Read Harder tasks are unveiled, I go through my over 600 book deep to read list on Goodreads looking for books to fulfill each task. I knew this one would be difficult, there just isn’t much in the way of non-fiction graphic works on my TBR, which is an area I could do to grow in (thus, doing this reading challenge each year since 2015). I was […]

“In any event,” Percy went on, “what I had thought were principles were merely manners, and they’re utterly insufficient for my present circumstances.”

The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

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The Queer Principles of Kit Webb is a book unabashedly about the heart. There are so many famous quotes about the heart that remind me forcefully of this book. Perhaps the easiest is the heart wants what it wants. So much of the plot of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb is caught up in its leads doing what their hearts tell them is right, what they know to be true from somewhere deep within. We get our two heroes, the titular Kit Webb, a […]

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”

The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot

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I had an idea: I want to start reading at least one book each year published a hundred years ago. For the next several years it will be a time period that I study for work, but it was more than something I felt compelled to do for work. For as often as works are written for and of their time, there is also often works that can tell us a great deal about when they were written and still be for now. I’m hoping […]

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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This is my first in depth experience with Didion’s writing (although likely not my last as I have Year of Magical Thinking already on this year’s to read list). Slouching Towards Bethlehem as a title caught my imagination years ago and has stayed with me (I was unaware it was a further literary illusion, missing the Yeats connection). This is Didion’s definitive portrait America, but most specifically California, in the 1960s. I read plenty of books published outside of my own lifetime, but reading Slouching […]



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