Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The author and I might get a second chance at viewing this phenomenon again

Journey Around the Sun: The Story of Halley’s Comet by James Gladstone

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When a nonfiction book is written in a fiction format, this is one of my favorite ways of presenting it. Everything is accessible and able to be conveniently understood. It teases the interests and allows us to be happy with what we have or go on to explore more. In Journey Around the Sun: The Story of Halley’s Comet we have the story of Halley’s Comet being told by the comet itself. The voice of the comet is friendly and almost like a beloved grandparent. […]

If you want to keep on swimmin’ you’ll need to take care of the planet first

To Change a Planet by Christina Soontorvat

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To Change a Planet by Christina Soontorvat is a lovely story about how one small event, person, or thing, can have a global impact. And if each one of us bans together, we can try and help the issues we have created. Of course, there is little new to this concept presented in the pages of Soontorvat’s story. Yet, it is a nice book. It would be good for a classroom setting, or a quiet time read. The colorfully bold illustrations by Rahele Jomepour Bell […]

Just read the G-D book, okay?

The Blacker the Berry by Joyce Carol Thomas

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This lovely book of poems about being yourself that is gorgeously illustrated, called The Blacker the Berry created two main thoughts for me. First, why did they pick this poem instead of another to be the title? Color Struck would seem like a stronger move. Of course, this led to my self-discussion of “Well struck is a harsh word, and the person choosing probably did not want a word that has a negative connotation as the first thing you see.” And then that led to, […]

If Jane was vain, and Rochester was…sort of the same

Dragonwyck (1945) by Anya Seton

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A Gothic scholar I follow on Twitter mentioned Dragonwyck quite recently, which recalled giddy memories of swooning at the suspense and romance and delicious clothes as an early teenager, probably too young to be reading about abusive relationships shrouded (at least initially) in glamour. But then again, I read Jane Eyre then too. So I ordered cheap secondhand paperback off Awesomebooks, and read it in a night. Miranda is a pretty farm girl with aristocratic aspirations, in Connecticut in the 1840s. A distant cousin, Nicholas Van […]

It might as well have been a squirrel telling me the story

Shakespeare for Squirrels by Christopher Moore

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Seems I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a rut. I tried reading Nick Offerman’s Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, but had to abandon it due to sheer boredom. Then I thought returning to Christopher Moore would be a fun palette cleanser after that, only to wind up with a bit of a brain fog that kept me from being able to focus on the book. So it was a good while before I finally managed to plug my way through the whole […]

Of Lice and Men

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

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Nothing endures. Don’t you see, Bonox? That’s what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.  On the face of it, the plot of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about war: […]



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