Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“For most autistics existing in a world not built for them, anxiety is the baseline and constant background hum that their daily life has to play over.”

Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

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Before this book I knew Fern Brady not at all. She’s made a name for herself between the UK comedy and television scenes, and while I enjoy a British panel show I’ve managed to miss Brady entirely. I decided to request this book from NetGalley based purely on the fact that this is a memoir of a woman who was diagnosed with autism as an adult and that’s a story I am very interested in. Like Brady, I too do a reasonably convincing impression of […]

A Disappointing Read for Me

So Compassionate it Hurts: My Life as a Rabbi on the Spectrum by Tzemah Yoreh

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I was really excited to read this because I’d never seen another book that combined looking at Judaism and Autism through a memoir lens. Unfortunately this book was just not for me and I ended up irritated and forcing myself to finish it. It’s a pretty short book and a third of it is sermons and poetry, which for me took away from the actual memoir portion. Yoreh is extremely into poetry and I know this is a personal issue, but I am not a […]

The Heart Principle grabbed mine and didn’t let go

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

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Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle was everything I wanted and more. Our heroine Anna Sun is going through it. She is a violinist stuck in a loop after a performance video goes viral on YouTube. With every practice session, she wants to replicate that moment with precision. She ends up burned out and unable to finish the song. She is attempting therapy to find a breakthrough. Later that day, her boyfriend asks to “see other people” as an excuse to know that he’s ready to […]

Slightly Baffled

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

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Warning: here be spoilers America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on […]

“Autism is a fundamentally different way of being, and a fundamentally useful way of being.”

Keep Clear: My Adventures with Asperger's by Tom Cutler

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I have mixed feelings about this one. There were some good points in here and it shows how positive a diagnosis can be — once Tom realizes what the cause of his life-long struggles is, his depression evaporates and he is able to start taking concrete steps to cope with things. This is a combination autobiography and a series of pocket biographies of famous people he thinks were Autistic. The autobiography bits were the best part, and I found myself getting increasingly agitated every time […]

“Developing self-trust and self-compassion is a whole journey unto itself.”

Unmasking Autism by Devon Price

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This is a good overview and self-help aligned book for what Devon Price terms as “Masked Autistics.” I am among those and saw a lot of positive press for this book from other Autistic people, so I got it for my birthday and got around to reading it this week. This is a well-written and straight forward text, so it was an easy and enjoyable read. I saw several people were crying reading this because it hit so close to home — I did not […]



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