Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I often described my sudden shift in self-awareness as feeling as if a demon had entered my room in the middle of the night, startled me awake by whispering, ‘What if you were a man, sort of?’ into my ear, then slithered out the window before I could ask any follow-up questions.”

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

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This would honestly be five stars except for a handful of essays/interludes that were too experimental and obscure for me to get anything out of them. I’m going to keep this review short and sweet for a couple of reasons, the first being that the time for me to have said something detailed, thoughtful, and incisive about it would have been back in late April when I first finished it. That time has now long passed. The second reason being that I’m not sure I […]

The journey of one boy becoming himself

And I’m Not a Girl: A Transgender Story by Maddox Lyons

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The subject of transgender kids is a hot topic today. Regardless if you are in the court of “yay! Kids! Be you!” or in the court of “How can they know they are not their birth gender at a young age?” it is there. And I’m Not a Girl: A Transgender Story is another book dealing with this situation. Told from the point of view of the child, this seems like it is a realistic journey a young boy might take to become his true […]

How gender screws with all of us

The Gender Games: the problem with men and women, from someone who has been both by Juno Dawson

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Part memoir and part introduction to gender and trans issues, Dawson, a trans woman, strikes a balance between her personal experience with gender, both pre- and post-transition, and a wider discussion of how gender messes with all of us. Her main argument is that gender is a ridiculously narrow set of expectations that hurts everyone: cis and trans, binary and non, female and male, from before we are even born. As someone with only a surface understanding of gender theory, I liked how clearly she […]

Future publication that you should know about now

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Kiss Number 8 is a graphic novel that will not be coming out until March of next year, but really deserves a lot of press beforehand. Like Check, Please! Hockey by Ngozi Ukazu (previously reviewed here and currently out) Colleen AF Venable does not shy away from some tough issues. However, unlike Ukazu there is less humor. Warning: to best show you this book there are a lot of spoilers below. Therefore, I will say here, this is a great book, but will not be […]

This book wasn’t written for me, and I feel fine

Dreadnought by April Daniels

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Roger Ebert used to talk about how important emotional response was to him as a critic, often more important than the technical and artistic merits. Even the most technically and artistically exquisite film could be a hollow and unsatisfying experience if he didn’t connect emotionally, and the opposite could also be true: sometimes, without any other explanation, a seeming piece of trash could be surprisingly fun simply because it connected to something ineffable inside him. So when the whole “Brie Larson commits white genocide against […]

First love, gender, and other complicated things

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Sometimes, a random internet search leads you to some awesome places. One night two weeks ago, I was in the library. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to read, so I did a search for Southern Lesbian fiction. There were no new Rita Mae Brown books (that weren’t fox or cat related) and most of titles the query returned, the library didn’t have. (I know, shocking that a fairly conservation, Northern NJ, small-town library wasn’t overflowing with Southern Lesbian lit, right?) However, they did […]



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