Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Get it, Fred? I’m holey!”

Black December by Scott Hunter

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DCI Brendan Moran, still recovering from a severe car accident the year before, is called out to a Catholic boarding school named Charnford Abbey, where one of the monks has been murdered (I accidentally typed ‘monkeys’ instead of ‘monks’ here, which would have been better). The abbot and other monks seem strangely uncooperative. Soon, another body is found, unravelling the ancient secrets of the closed order and blah blah blah. The story also includes narcolepsy, a group of cunning Romanian squatters, a long-lost love lost […]

Probably more my fault than the book….

The Book of English Magic by Richard Heygate, Philip Carr-Gomm

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The Book of English Magic turned out to have two very special magic powers: It made me realise that I’m nowhere near as open-minded as I think I am, and It managed to make one minute of reading fell like ten years of slogging through swampland Let me explain… Despite not being at all spiritual or religious myself, I do enjoy reading about the beliefs that some people hold as a way of trying to better understand them. Whilst I’ve often then arrived at some […]

Will this be a review of this book or a review of my Episcopalian conversion? Stay tuned.

Jesus Was An Episcopalian (And You Can Be One Too!) by Rev. Chris Yaw

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There’s a lot to unpack here and most of it really isn’t about this book. I was raised Lutheran and turned out queer, which took me down Agnostic Avenue. I was also born and raised with an unfortunate penchant for self-loathing and perfectionism and never lost a deep-down belief in some kind of God. Enter a great big beautiful holy corrupt institutional enabler: the Catholic Church. And that’s how I became a queer adult convert to Catholicism. I felt something in the church I’d never […]

The original Book

The Good News Bible by God/ Anonymous

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It feels very wrong to write a book review of The Bible, but it would also feel wrong to not get the Cannonball Reads credit for reading it- so here we are!  I’m splitting this review into two, one review for the Old Testament and one review for the New Testament- not only does this make sense thematically, but this way I also get double the book reading credit!  Although my hesitations in writing this review are also many, I’m also hopeful that God, if […]

“My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.”

Heretics Anonymous by Katie Henry

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Michael Ausman is seething. His father has uprooted their family yet again for a job promotion — this time Michael was barely two months into his junior year. Now he is faced with making yet another new group of friends in another new school, and to make matters worse, that school is a Catholic one. Michael is an atheist, and he has no interest in setting down any roots lest they be ripped back out again. But on the first day of school, he is […]

In the immortal words of Dorothy Zbornak, “If you have to ask, it does not matter.”

Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

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I’ve never been the type to read more than one book at a time, but earlier this year, I decided I should both spend less time online and read more poetry and philosophy and mythology and the like. I kept one book on my nightstand to read before bed, another by my desk to read in downtime during work instead of picking up my phone. And it worked! I’ve spent much less time online and more time reading, but this success also led to an […]



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