Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Any mom who misses a chance to dress her kid up like a hotdog sounds like a psychopath to me.

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

by Leave a Comment

He’s looking to validate himself through someone else. She hasn’t caught on because she doesn’t know who she is. ― Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age CBR17 Bingo: TBR For the past week, I’ve tried to think of an appropriate metaphor for what this reading experience was like for me. In terms of amusement park metaphors, it was like a rollercoaster with the slow climb to the top, each click of the chain ramping up the tension until you’re yanked up and over, all of […]

Fairy Tales: a genre by and for “we the people”

Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book by Angela Carter

by Leave a Comment

I picked up this fairy tale collection in Tim’s Books, a tiny off-the-path used bookstore in Provincetown, because it had Angela Carter’s name on it, and I’ve been dedicating my book-buying to hoarding collections by the best fairy tale scholars, especially the feminist ones. It has, as you can see, a delightfully dated cover, but its ideas are very radical and timeless. The book is a selection of fairy tales and folktales chosen by Carter (author of the brilliant The Bloody Chamber), highlighting some of the […]

“Promise and potential:” Overlooked Vocational School Students in China

Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth by T.E. Woronov

by 2 Comments

Stanford University Press was having an 80% off summer sale, which was an amazing deal, so I got a bunch of books that I otherwise would never have thought to purchase since academic press prices are usually prohibitively high. Class Work is the first of the batch that I’ve read, and it was a good start. This is a slim volume that packs a lot of information about the Chinese school system and the impact of testing and government efforts to make or re-mold class structures. […]

Heartland – Heartbreaking and thoughtful in America’s Heartland

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

by Leave a Comment

This is yet another great read I “discovered” via ANUW, the Association of Northwestern University Women book club that I am a member of, by way of my employment at Northwestern University. I was a little leery, as last year the book club selections were pretty heavy to include J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. At first thought, his book has many parallels to hers, so I wasn’t that interested in reading more of the same. Vance of Elegy grew up in rural Appalachia and details the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo