Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I'm left-handed! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Halbs's Quick Questions interview.)

Halbs's Reviews:

“I buried my hands in my pockets, curious at the enormity of it all.”

Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr

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Brian Allen Carr’s short novel is an odyssey of a week in a normal life, broken up by long chapters for each day. The days are long, but the book is quick. Opioid, Indiana is about a teenager called Riggle. His dad is dead and his mom his dead. He’s been passed around the foster system and even the homes of his family, depending on whether someone wants to go through the hassle of feeding a kid to collect checks. Riggle is from Texas, but […]

I identified with this one so much I wrote the author a thank you letter!

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

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I don’t know the writer of this book, but in some ways I feel that I do. Author Joanne McNeil and I discovered the internet at the same time, as we were working out our own tween identities. Both of our families got on AOL in the mid-90s. We tinkered around with chat rooms, played with websites, clicked around just to see where we could go. As we got older we meandered into the blogosphere, finding like-minded people, ever updating blogrolls. We tinkered with MySpace […]

A Warm Blanket of a YA Rom-Com. You’ve Got Mail 3000

Tweet Cute by Emma Lord

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This YA novel has everything: tweeting twins, grilled cheese sandwiches, Nashville girls baking feminist desserts, dive teams, teens crying, and celebrity endorsements. Tweet Cute by Emma Lord centers around Pepper and Jack, two high school seniors attending a swanky private school in Manhattan. While they live in a Gossip Girl-like world of swanky luxury, things don’t feel luxurious to the main characters. Pepper is a Nashville transplant, unsure of her place in NYC and in her own family. Her parents are recently divorced. Her father stayed in Nashville, […]

Some More Ontology, Just for Fun

The Courage To Be by Paul Tillich

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I’m by no means a philosophy expert! That being said, my hope is to become more conversant in the “love of wisdom” in order to live a better life. As mentioned in a previous post, I started reading theologian-philosopher Tillich because MLK read Tillich. MLK even critiqued him as a major part of his doctoral work.  I grabbed The Courage to Be, my second Tillich book, from the library just because it was what they happened to have on the shelf while I was browsing. […]

“The truth can be seen. Directly. The question is, are you willing to accept what it tells you?”

The Secret History of Twin Peaks: A Novel by The Secret History of Twin Peaks: A Novel

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Man, what a fun ride this was! The Secret History of Twin Peaks is technically a book, in that it’s a bound collection of pages. But what you’re buying is really more of a mystery kit. Rather than reading like a novel, Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost has assembled a collection of photos, news articles, top secret files, journal entries, letters, and a mysterious dossier. The reader sorts through all of the documents side by side with an FBI agent whose presence is made known […]

Monsters and Heroes

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara

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While I’ve been excited to read this book since it came out a year ago, it was only recently that I was finally able to snag a copy from my library. This is probably because of the book’s myriad awards, and because it’s good. The timing works out pretty nicely, though, as this is a great read for Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (which is tomorrow, at the time I write this). I have to admit that I didn’t fully understand the title […]



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