Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Unpainted Huffhines

CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant

I love to read, one of the many personality traits I've inherited from my dad. My family lost him to cancer in September 2021.

Unpainted Huffhines's Reviews:

In Many Ways, Very Necessary

The Afterlife of Malcolm X by Mark Whitaker

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I first encountered the legend Malcolm X when I was in fifth grade. At my lily-white elementary school, my–a rarity in my hometown–black male teacher distributed a list of names to his predominantly white students and asked each to choose a name for a report. This was fifth grade and in the late 1980s; we were beginning to learn about black history, and it was February–Black History Month. The mimeographed list came to me, and I chose Malcolm X. I’d never before heard of him; […]

Unlikable Done Right

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino

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Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins features one of my favorite tropes, the unlikable female main character (UFMC). Writing a UFMC is such a difficult balancing act: make her flawed enough to be engagingly frustrating, but not so flawed that the reader can’t quite believe that anyone would be willing to put up with her BS. The Queen of UFMC is of course Amy Dunne from Gone Girl. (Spoilers ahead for Gone Girl in case you want to continue living under that cozy rock.) She is […]

Read This Book Before It’s Banned

Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News by Alec Karakatsanis

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“Police leaders do not want to talk about the everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy. Condemning [Derek] Chauvin as a ‘bad apple’ is a safer tactic. But it is not ‘bad apple’ police officers who make 10.6 million arrests every year and who, since 1980, have helped quintuple the rate of incarceration in the U.S. from its historical average. It is not ‘bad apple’ police offers who purchase tanks and grenade launchers for themselves or who enforce cash bail. It is not ‘bad apple’ officers […]

Unreadable Things

Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey

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Well, that’s a bit harsh … but I found Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey difficult to follow and pretty boring. Full disclosure: I love thrillers and horror novels. The more real they are, the more terrifying I find them. So I was anticipating the experience of reading this book because it’s “inspired by a terrifying true story” according to the back of the book. And I am not super discriminating about the thrillers I read, either–I have torn through so many Freida McFadden books in […]

Burn Baby Burn

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

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At the outset: this book is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve read any prior S.A. Cosby novels, you know that violence–gritty, ugly, cruel, unvarnished–is an integral part of his characters’ worlds. These characters are usually trying to escape violence, but it comes for them due to fate, personal choice, or some combination of both. One of my favorite aspects of Cosby’s oeuvre is that blodshed is never pretty or glorified. The main characters, because they are essentially human, despise the carnage that […]

This History Is Still Being Written

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis

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“In answer to those who claim young people protesting across the country against mass incarceration, police violence, deportation, school inequality, rising Islamophobia, global injustice, and environmental racism are nothing like the activists of the storied days of the civil rights movement, our historically informed answer must be, they are” (208). Jeanne Theoharis’ A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History has been languishing on my TBR since 2018, the year it was published. I wish I had read it earlier, […]



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