Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Mea Gulpa

Famesick by Lena Dunham

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Lena Dunham and I have a long history together. I watched Girls at a time when its content was deeply resonant: a twenty-something living in a big city (look, okay, Brissie isn’t exactly The Big Apple, but it felt big to me), making terrible dating decisions and being wildly short-sighted. But there was something running through the show that appealed to me beyond surface-level identification. The line most people remember from the pilot episode is, of course, the famous “voice of a generation” proclamation (or […]

Quilt of love

A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins by Constance Moore

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When I need a quick read I look through my online reader saves and find all sorts of goodies. One of those was A Language of Stitches: The Radical Quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins by Constance Moore. Read (obviously) via an online reader, this book is due end of July-early August 2026. Rosie Lee Tompkins (born Effie Mae Martin ) reminds me of the artist Sister Mary Corita Kent because of their artistic style. Both were unusual, yet they were products of their time. They both […]

Belonging

Until We Meet Again by Lily Kim Qian

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Until We Meet Again by Lily Kim Qian is thoughtful and reflective. Qian gives us a coming of age story of a young herself, who is a Chinese-Canadian girl who deals with her family dynamics such as her mothers mental illness, her mother and fathers volatile relationship, and dealing with growing up with a caring father, but one who is just doing the best he can, and the attitudes of immigrant parents and “old school” Chinese values vs her western world. The cultural differences of […]

Drugs don’t always help

Unshrunk by Laura Delano

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Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (2025) by Laura Delano is another book I discovered on NPR’s List of Favorite Books. I have an older brother who fell into some major mental health problems when he was in college. He has had a very hard life since then. He is often difficult, nonsensical and hard to be around, but I also know what he was like before he got sick. In an effort to understand him better or maybe find something to help him, I find […]

Honestly, I didn’t even know virologist was a word, let alone how bada$$ they can be!

June Almeida, Virus Detective!: The Woman Who Discovered the First Human Coronavirus by Suzanne Slade and Elisa Paganelli

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Back in 2021 the book June Almeida, Virus Detective!: The Woman Who Discovered the First Human Coronavirus by Suzanne Slade and illustrator Elisa Paganelli was published. In 2026 I found a copy of it. I then read it. I liked it. And then I wrote a review about it. The theme is simple: woman scientist discovered ways of counteracting viruses, learned to use machines in ways no one had before, and would decades before it would be needed on a global scale, tells us that […]

No longer under his grandmother’s table

I Wish I Didn't Have to Tell You This: A Graphic Memoir by Eugene Yelchin

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I enjoy Eugene Yelchin as an author and illustrator. I have read several titles including, The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, Breaking Stalin’s Nose, and The Rooster Who Would Not Be Quiet! by Carmen Agra Deedy (illustrated by Yelchin). Therefore I was excited about I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This: A Graphic Memoir written and illustrated by Yelchin. I was assuming it was going to be a memoir of his life during the early 1980s, but it […]



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