Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

But I’m one of the good guys.

Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles

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Del has it bad for Kiera Westing, and he’s crushed on her almost his entire life, from kindergarten to high school. But the girl always has a boyfriend, and he can never seem to get the timing right to snag her during the in-between times. But this time when she finally becomes available, Del may have an in. See, Kiera doesn’t seem to be in a rush to find a new boyfriend – she is taking it so slow, she has joined the Purity Pledge […]

Beloved by Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and America Ferrera

Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper

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4.5 stars. Loved this book! True to its title, Brittney Cooper writes with very eloquent rage. I cannot wait to read more from her because she is a true force and her already strong writing is only going to get stronger. Very intersectional, Cooper is a good place to start for anyone wanting to learn more about intersections of privilege and why black women are (or have the right to be) so angry. Her style is very approachable because she is smart as hell and […]

I’m Glad I Read It But I Wish Someone Else Had Written It

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

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Best for: People looking for hard facts on how the lack of data collected about women harms us. In a nutshell: Much of ruling society treats (cis) men as the default, dismissing the needs of women as abnormal. This screws us over. Worth quoting: “Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche […]

The Book is more Interesting than the Content

The Enemies of Books by William Blades

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I picked this book up in an antique bookstore in Tokyo. I bought it mostly for the title, expecting a history of censorship, which is a topic I’ve always been interested in. What I got was more literally interpretation of enemies. Blades covers fire, water, vermin and dust as if they are free thinking enemies actively planning the destruction of books. His focus is entirely on the books as items that carry knowledge and not as special items in themselves. He says, “The value of […]

We all have biases, or “Why grandma might suddenly sound like a racist”

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Twelve years ago, my grandmother passed away at the age of 94. Born in 1912, she was the product of a different time, but other than maybe telling a slightly off-color joke or wondering out loud why there were so many more homosexuals around these days than when she was young, I don’t recall her being prejudiced against any particular group (except maybe Italians, but that’s a story for another day). Apparently in her final days in the nursing home, however, she started loudly proclaiming […]

A Lot Going On Here

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Best for: Those looking for a quick read that’s mostly about Hillary Clinton’s run for president. In a nutshell: This is “An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.” But it’s more a short retelling of some parts of the Clinton 2016 Presidential Campaign framed around the idea that it’s a letter to the first woman to be US President. Worth quoting: “I have always thought that I could do any job a man can do just as well as him. Only recently […]



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