Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Sophia

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I love to read, and I love to learn. I wish I were retired so I could spend more time on my random hobbies!

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“Hello, you fighting orphans.”

Tokyo Rose - Zero Hour by Andre R. Frattino, et al.

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Looking for another book to read, I searched through NPR’s Best Books List for something new and found another graphic novel. Tokyo Rose – Zero Hour: A Japanese American Woman’s Persecution and Ultimate Redemption after World War II (2022) by Andre R. Frattino, Kate Kasenow, and Janice Chiang. This graphic novel is about Iva Toguri. She was an American citizen of Japanese descent, and a young, independent, patriotic woman. In the summer of 1941, her parents convinced her to go to Japan to help care for a sick aunt. […]

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life

Demon Copperhead by Barbra Kingsolver

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All of a sudden, I was seeing Demon Copperhead (2022) by Barbara Kingsolver all over the place. I first noticed it on NPR’s Best Books List. And then my book club chose it as our next book. I’m very familiar with Barbra Kingsolver. She was one of my favorite authors for many years, and I’ve read most of her books. However, I was disappointed in one of her latest books–Unsheltered and didn’t finish it. I wasn’t sure if Kingsolver was a good author for me anymore, so I […]

Sad, informative, and moving

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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I’m not a big reader of graphic novels, but I usually read one or two a year and appreciate the differences in storytelling. With graphic novels, I’ve always steered towards memoirs, and Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022) by Kate Beaton, is no different. I first saw Ducks on NPR’s Best Books List. I almost immediately felt a connection to Beaton. We’re not too far apart in age, and I felt her pain as she tells the story of how she struggled after she graduated from college with […]

Not my favorite

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni

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My book club chose The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell (2018) by Robert Dugoni for our next book club book. I had not heard of the book or the author, but my friend said she liked it, and I was hoping to as well. The plot is a coming-of-age story of a boy in Burlingame, California who was born with ocular albinism in the late 1950’s. The only consequence of Sam’s ocular albinism is that it makes his irises red. However, he is known as “the […]

“When it came to equality, 1952 was a real disappointment.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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Lessons in Chemistry (2022) by Bonnie Garmus is on NPR’s Best Books List, but I’d seen the title all over the place. The pink cover with the woman on the front made it look like a romance novel, but the NPR description sounded a lot more fraught than what you would expect. Initially, it didn’t sound very appealing, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read it. I did become a little more interested when it was recently recommended by a book club friend. But […]

The lifelong physical and mental effects of trauma

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

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I am on a roll with the books from NPR’s Best Books List. My latest is What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma (2022) by Stephanie Foo. With my job, we inevitably run into a number of people who have suffered significant trauma. Sometimes they tell us, and sometimes we don’t know the details, but it’s evident in other ways. I feel like it helps me when I have a better understanding of what others have gone through and how trauma can affect […]



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