Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You’d think spitting up frogs would be a lot like the worst stomach flu you’ve ever had, but it’s surprisingly different.”

The Carrefour Curse by Dianne. K. Salerni

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There are two tasks in the Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books (and others that are for a picture book, YA book by a trans author, and YA non-fiction) and works intended for readers on the younger than YA end of the spectrum are basically non-existent on my to read list so I had to do some research to find books to read. By and large, libraries can be relied upon to point you in good directions, so I went hunting for […]

Travel Research Books

The Seafarers: The Atlantic Crossing by Melvin Maddocks, editor

The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Black

Traveling Beyond Her Sphere: American Women on the Grand Tour 1814-1914 by Bess Beatty

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At work we’re in research mode, preparing for our new exhibition about travel in the 19th century. Based on my interests and previous research avenues I got handed the Grand Tour and a piece of the cruise industry as my responsibilities. For the past few weeks, I’ve been scouring all my usual resource repositories, googling some very interesting UK museum websites, and our curator made sure I had some books to work my way through. They’ve been… a mixed bag.   The Seafarers: The Atlantic Crossing by […]

damn whoever tries to burn you

The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One by Amanda Lovelace

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One of the Read Harder tasks from 2023 was to read a book of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author and another was to read a book by an author who was geographically close to you. Amanda Lovelace, author of The Princess Saves Herself in This One is both queer and lives in New Jersey so I had put her second book The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One on my to read for the year. And then 2023 just did not cooperate even […]

Getting in my review of Class Act

Class Act by Jerry Craft

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Class Act reminded me of The Hate U Give, in that we have a protagonist who is attending a school with predominantly white, privileged classmates. Our main characters are Drew and Jordan (Jordan was the focus on Craft’s previous book in this universe, New Kid) as they deal with being scholarship student eighth graders at Riverdale Academy.   But what’s this story about, you ask? From Goodreads: “Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no stranger to the saying “You have to work twice as hard to […]

Rogues, the whole lot of them.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

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Last year I did a Patrick Radden Keefe double-header: Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. It was… a doozy. Keefe writes incredibly well (he’s got a slew of awards to prove it) and excels at deep dives into larger-than-life personalities. When Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks went on sale on Chirp I scooped it up. Rogues is a collection of Keefe’s previous writings for The New Yorker. Keefe describes in his preface how journalists often develop a lane, and while he […]

“Sometimes I feel like my brain is a machine built by someone who lost the instruction manual.”

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

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I haven’t often re-read books in the past decade as I’ve gone on my Cannonball journey. But sometimes I revisit an old favorite, or earlier books in a series before continuing with the newly published. Due to my personal commitment to reading banned and challenged books it has also meant that our Banned Book Week book clubs have included re-reads. I try to review the re-reads on their own merits – what was the reading experience this time. But in the case of Gender Queer my […]



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