Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“The world needs all types of minds.” ― Temple Grandin

The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin by Julia Finley Mosca

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Dr. Temple Grandin must have something new coming out, has an important birthday or the fact autism is getting a push again right now, as we have had a review of an adult book about her, and now I have found the picture book, The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin. This is a picture book by Julia Finley Mosca and therefore, is not going to go into extreme detail, and obviously does not go into the controversies around her. […]

“So she’s a mystic autistic?”

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

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That title is the question my fiancee posed to me when I ranted to her about this book. Honestly, I’d say she’s not necessarily wrong. Although Willow is never confirmed to be autistic, probably in large part due to her family situation being so everchanging and her school counselor being an abject failure, she clearly is, and the book seems to just be her, through some voodoo magic, causing drastic shifts in the lives of everybody she comes into contact with. Like she just exists […]

Must everybody fail this poor kid?

Colin Fischer by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz

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Another in the list of books I looked into simply in the hopes of finding decent autistic representation. What I got was… passable, I guess? Colin Fischer tells the story of a high-school kid on the autism spectrum (specifically, he’s diagnosed with the now-outdated “Asperger’s syndrome”) who goes to a regular high school with zero accommodations made for him and is relentlessly bullied by both his peers and his own younger brother (in a cruel twist of fate, given how instantly excited and in love […]

The Curious Incident of the Convoluted Plot

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

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My thoughts on this book are… messy. On one hand, it is refreshing to see a book narrated entirely by a character with ASD. On the other hand, Haddon did not research prior to writing the book, saying “imagination trumps research.” Plus, the novel doesn’t even commit to the diagnosis. There exist many undiagnosed kids and adults, but it felt peculiar in these particular circumstances that Christopher, our narrator, never even has the possibility floated. On one hand, what Christopher puts up on the regular, such as […]

But honestly, I think they are…

All Cats Are On the Autism Spectrum by Kathy Hoopmann

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This is the book my one sister says she used to help her daughter understand her brother’s autism, since she loves cats. It’s funny because I’d had more or less the same thought as the title of this book, going so far as to google variations of it, numerous times. The thought occurred to me that it seemed like people on the spectrum, children especially, tended to gravitate towards cats more than dogs, and my brain went from that thought to “well, naturally, because they’re […]

Here goes…

The Autistic Brain: Thinking across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek

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For the sake of transparency, I guess I should delve briefly into why I went down the autism rabbit hole that led me to reading this book. It all started with occasional “maybe you are autistic” jokes from my fiancee that I brushed off. Over time, particularly after watching multiple seasons of both versions of Love on the Spectrum, among other things, a reassessment began that brought me to the conclusion that there was likely something to those jokes. I saw some of myself in […]



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