Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Good God, Lemon!

Bossypants by Tina Fey

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My disappointing experience with Taylor Tomlinson’s new memoir put me in the mood to revisit a memoir I loved. When it was a brand new release, I purchased a copy of Tina Fey’s Bossypants from an airport bookstore at Louis Armstrong in New Orleans, and by the time my plane touched down in Newark I had finished it. That was 2011, when 30 Rock nearing the end of its run and Fey’s legendary appearances as Sarah Palin on SNL were fresh in the public memory. I […]

Reflecting on the road to progress

So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis

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Bingo Square: Right (the right to exist, the right to be oneself, Civil Rights) This was this fall session’s non-fiction selection for queer book club, and we all quite enjoyed it. Of course, it was also one of those books where we ran out of things to say because it can be hard to talk critically about people’s experiences. The book was part of a larger oral history project and the author focused specifically on elder people of color in the queer community. While their […]

Rediscovering the past

Maria and the Cave Paintings by Barbara Lowell and Elke Boschinger

What Marcel Found: The Incredible Discovery of the Lascaux Cave Painting by Cedar Pruitt and David Litchfield

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A while back I read Maria and the Cave Paintings by Barbara Lowell and Elke Boschinger (due early November 2026; via online reader). This book shows how a child, with her father, explores a local cave of Spain. She wanders off on her own, coming upon paintings on the walls of the cave. Her father is convinced they are prehistoric. Though things are exciting, at first (as it is the 1880s and one of the first discoveries of such things), over time, the pull of […]

Dead Birds Can’t Fly

An Evening with Claire by Gaito Gazdanov

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This is a good book, in the sense that it is honest. But don’t be fooled by the cover! It is no delicate romance — and Claire hardly figures. In An Evening with Claire (1929), Gaito Gazdanov drags the reader through the emotional swamp of emigré estrangement, through a barely-disguised “Kolya.” Like Gazdanov, Kolya joins the ill-fated White Army in the 1910s, seemingly on a whim, after a largely apolitical and lonely childhood. Over the course of a few years, he drifts to the edges […]

Where’s the Punchline?

Actually, Nevermind by Taylor Tomlinson

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I would call myself a fan of Taylor Tomlinson’s work. I’ve seen a couple of her specials on Netflix. I love her appearances on Conan O’Brien’s podcast. I was a fairly regular viewer of After Midnight on CBS. So I went into her essay collection Actually, Nevermind with eager anticipation. I listened to the audiobook because I thought it would be even better to hear her words in her voice. So I am surprised and fairly disappointed to say that I didn’t enjoy Actually Nevermind at all. […]

When They Don’t Come Out the Other Side.

Wormhole: My journey into the dark heart of alternative medicine by Hannah McElhinney

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Wormhole is a book that manages to pack a significant amount into its rather slim page count. Author Hannah McElhinney’s cousin, Laura, travelled from Australia to Malaysia back in 2022 for a ‘medical procedure.’ After Lauren went radio silent for a few days, her family was contacted by a mysterious friend who none of them had ever heard of, telling them that there had been complications with her treatment and that she could not be brought out from under anaesthetic.  Within days, members of Lauren’s […]



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