Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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I worked three jobs in the summer of 2005. I frequently worked more than one during any given day. Days off did not exist- except, miraculously, for the 4th of July. The history of the 4th holds no meaning here, just that I finally had a day to myself. I spent my one day off in bed, reading The Handmaid’s Tale from cover to cover. I did not leave the room. I turned down, much to the chagrin of the person whose bed it was, all opportunities […]

An autobiography in verse

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

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4.5 stars Official book description: Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. […]

*bell tolls* SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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Trust Exercise punched me in the gut, kicked me while I was down, and still I could not leave it alone.  I was once an insufferable THEEEEAAAAATER kid, and the teens on display here made my blood curdle- out of immediate and inescapable recognition. I was a pretentious brat until far too recently (still pretentious, just too old to be a brat) and roiling guilt flowed through my veins throughout the entire book. I have been working diligently on keeping my ideas off of other […]

Quiet but Devestating

Academy Street by Mary Costello

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Academy Street is deceivingly short, clocking in at 145 pages. Mary Costello fits an entire lifetime into this space, and while my original thought was that there was no possible way to fit a lifetime in such a short space properly, with all the deep meaning and detail, I was so very, very wrong. Tess Lohan is the quiet character, and in many books she’d be the one-lined, barely named side character. Her life is nothing short of ordinary, at least as far as story plotting […]

Well, hell, I still don’t know what the perfect society looks like

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

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CBR11bingo: Award Winner – Nebula Award for Best Novel (1974), Hugo Award for Best Novel (1975), Locus Award for Best Novel (1975) Double Bingo! Horizontal: I Love This, Not My Wheelhouse, Listicle, Rainbow Flag, Award Winner Vertical: Reading the TBR, Science!, History/Schmistory, Award Winner, Summer Read Last year I read my first Le Guin Novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, and couldn’t stop raving about it. On the advice of a fellow Cannonballer, I decided to read The Dispossessed for my Award Winner Square (tip for next […]

The name I can never spell right on the first try

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

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This was a book I was sure I had read, because I feel like it’s been around forever.  Nope! 2003. (Maybe I saw the movie in 2008?) It feels like an older book as well. So if the author was going for a classic feel, she got it!  There is the story, but sometimes the author asks questions of the reader, often with vocabulary. Good for reading with a group!   The book is set up in four sections.  In the first part, we meet […]



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