Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Now he carried the past with him rather than being carried on the back of the brute that was his history.”

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

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If you were beginning to sense the onset of dementia and had the chance to take a drug that would clear your mind for a short period of time but then cause your death, would you take it? Ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey doesn’t hesitate when offered the chance because he knows he has something important he is supposed to do before he dies and needs to remember what it is. This short 2010 novel by Walter Mosley is a touching reflection on memory, history and what […]

Voting for May #CannonBookClub

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The votes have been counted and Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo is the selection for the May 2022 AAPI-themed book club! Learn how book club works and when you can join in on the discussion in the announcement post. May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (or AAPIHM for short) in the United States and was created by Congress in 1992. Here at Cannonball Read we’ll be celebrating its 30th anniversary by focusing on authors who fall within the roughly 50 ethnic […]

Dirty thumbs and online not-so-nice-people

Chloe #6: Green Thumb by Greg Tessier

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Chloe #6: Green Thumb by Greg Tessier  is a compilation of two stories about growing up and being the best you that you can be. In story one, Chloe and her friends tackle the school project of creating a garden at their school. Chloe at first does not want to get “down and dirty” until one of her friends shows her own much fun it can be. And from there Chloe figures out ways to make her school and home greener. While it branches off […]

My dad isn’t a vampire but my mom was (almost) a lumberjack

Lumberjackula by Mat Heagerty

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We know the story presented in Lumberjackula by Mat Heagerty: a child wants to please his parents by doing what they want him to do; however, he does not want to do exactly what either wants for him as neither choice is the right fit for him. He has a need, a need to DANCE! But when your mother is a lumberjack and your father a vampire, you must decide which side you are on. Or do you? Of course, there are lies (Jack tells […]

The House of Morgan

The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow

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I cannot explain how impossibly weird it is to mention that my interest in this book comes explicitly from Real Housewives of New York. Sonja Morgan married one of the Morgan heirs when he was already fairly old and she was still fairly young. At the beginning of the show, she’s a few years divorced, but is still the beneficiary of that connection. She’s also clearly very damaged from the divorce, or least fragile. The story more or less goes that when her husband was […]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

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I guess if you’re going to read a “young man begins to question the institutions that have built up his understanding of the world” you could go with one of the best. Although the sub-genre obviously predates this book by quite a wide margin with The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe being more of the OG version — well aside from Hamlet, and The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil being a contemporary of Joyce’s. The difference here is the way in which […]



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