Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About allisonata

CBR11 participant

Avid reader and writer in Northern California. Interests range from history to YA to NY Times best-sellers to graphic novels. Trying to decolonize my bookshelf and make sure women get at least equal time.

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Let Your Life Be a Counter Friction to Stop the Machine

This is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

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Welcome to the Anthropocene era, the fossil fuel-powered nightmare of our own making. Our hot and crowded planet has hit Defcon 3. Right now, a record number of fires is burning down the Brazilian rainforest, threatening three million endemic plant and animal species. Mass bleaching in the heat-stressed Great Barrier Reef has reduced baby coral by 89% since 2016. Okjökull is the first (but not the last) glacier to disappear from Iceland. Last month Paris hit 109º, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city, […]

I Have Always Imagined that Paradise Will Be a Kind of Library

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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Have you ever felt that a book was written just for you? Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is my Platonic ideal: a novel by an Elder Millennial, set in an alternate San Francisco Bay Area populated by talented, curious people, weird-but-plausible technologies, and endless shelves of books. By the time I discovered the in-story trilogy of fantasy novels and the credible centuries-old secret society, I committed to becoming a Sloan completist. Our initially hapless first-person hero Clay Jannon is looking for a job, any job. His […]

Reproductive Freedom and the Apocalypse

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

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  Content warning: sexual violence, stillbirth A worldwide plague kills nearly everyone on the planet. A midwife wakes in a San Francisco hotel. (It’s practically “28 Days Later.”) She stocks up on antibiotics—and, critically, birth control—and walks into an extra-hellish hellscape. Since females experienced the highest mortality rate, the rare woman or girl that survives is a treasure. Commodity. Object. The midwife trains herself to be self-sufficient. She carries a gun. However, the key to her survival is her avoidance of other people—that is, men. […]

10 Reasons to Get Out of Bed in the Morning

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

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Within two minutes of waking up, I remember things I’d rather not: raging wildfires, hurricanes, desperate refugees, white nationalists, dead gray whales washing up onshore. Keep Going is a gift, an emotional stain remover, the pep talk  I didn’t know I needed in order to tamp down my despair and resume making art. Kleon knows the struggle is real. (Good luck staying loose and open when the outside world is invading every level of your consciousness!) Here is a person who shows his work on […]

Like a Sports Movie, In Reverse

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

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Football is the quintessential American sport. Two disciplined armies meet out on an open field. Highly trained men in uniform wallop the enemy, denying them ground. Our super soldiers bash their brains in—and sometimes break their necks—for our entertainment. And we cheer. Because who doesn’t love a proxy war? It’s tribal. Downright primal. Are you entertained?! *checks notes* Pardon. Apparently, baseball is America’s game. A sport that considers the no-hitter, a game in which absolutely nothing happens, as the pinnacle of the art. A sport […]



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