Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I have a new hobby

The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

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I’m not sure if it was because I was getting older or my interests just shifted, but back in 2019 I suddenly became fascinated with birding. It felt like a whole new world opened up simply because I started paying attention. Now that I have a dog, I spend more time walking her than going out with my camera looking for birds. However, I still look out for them, and I still find birds (all animals, really) fascinating. I’m officially hooked. Recently I stumbled on […]

“Anybody who spends a lot of time burrowing through primary records of the old South is going to find almost anything they can imagine & more than a little that they never imagined.”

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely

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When people think of slavery in the American South, they usually imagine vast, intensely segregated plantations. However, usually Black people and their White enslavers lived cheek by jowl, and this terrible intimacy could give rise to many different kinds of tensions, as demonstrated by the six court cases covered in this book. Most of what I know about slavery in the United States was learned in the long ago days of high school and before, so I chose to pick up this book to both […]

Not for me

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

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My book club chose Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (2024) by Kara Swisher as our latest book. We’d already read another tech memoir, Careless People, which I enjoyed. I was hoping I would like Burn Book as well. In the end, I didn’t love it. Although there were parts that were engaging, I did not have enough interest in or knowledge about the subject matter for me to appreciate it. Kara Swisher has been a tech reporter for three decades, covering tech from the very beginning back in the […]

More lady pirates please.

Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read by Rebecca Alexandra Simon

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Let me start this off with a little taste from Amazon’ summary of this book: “Between August and October 1720, two female pirates named Anne Bonny and Mary Read terrorized the Caribbean in and around Jamaica. Despite their short career, they became two of the most notorious pirates during the height of the eighteenth-century Golden Age of Piracy.” Think about those dates. It took these ladies a mere THREE MONTHS to become the MOST NOTORIOUS. Actually, there is little documentation of Anne and Mary until […]

Probably should not have read this on a diving trip, but still glad I read it.

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

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The second of my non-fiction journey of 2026. This is an engrossing true story of a group of divers who discovered and identified a lost Nazi submarine of the coast of New Jersey in 1991. The story starts by setting the scene – to be a wreck diver (!) in 1980s (!) New Jersey (!) took a special kind of bravado, and the cast of characters has that in spades. The diving scene was full of hard drinkers, turf wars, and daring, sometimes knuckleheaded, quests. […]

Where Do the Rights of the Mother and the Rights of the Child Diverge?

Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of A Childhood Online by Fortesa Latifi

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Rating: 3.5 Stars In a nutshell: What is the cost – and what (if any) are the benefits – of sharing one’s children online? Best for: Those interested in the impact of sharing the lives of children on social media. Quote that made me think: “There is no child advocate, only the parents.” Why I chose it: I for some reason am finding social media quite interesting these days. Possibly because I’m not using it nearly as much as I used to Review: I am […]



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