Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Intentions always look better on paper than in reality.”

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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Another review of a Book Club choice, 2017’s The Hate U Give. A peek behind the scenes: this one almost got left off the voting, having been popular over the years but as it’s the 30th most challenged book of the decade 2010-2019 and the fifth most challenged in 2021 the argument to include it felt justified. This YA novel was challenged and banned in school libraries and curriculums because it was considered “pervasively vulgar” and because of drug use, profanity, and offensive language. Other […]

#CannonBookClub September Book Club Announcement

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Our September Book Club will be discussing Banned or Challenged Books on September 16-17, just ahead of Banned Book Week (September 18-24, 2022). Forty years ago, Banned Book Week began as a response to a sudden surge in book challenges in 1982. With the current push to limit access to books dealing with sexuality, gender identity, and race, we asked you what you wanted to read; and we’ve tallied up the votes for the top three. The books selected for our discussion come from a […]

Voting for September #CannonBookClub – Banned Books

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For our September Book Club we’ll be discussing Banned or Challenged Books on September 16th – 17th just ahead of Banned Book Week (September 18-24, 2022). Our plan is to celebrate our freedom to read by reading a selection of challenged books for this discussion. We’ll be doing a ranked vote to narrow our selections down to three with an eventual Discussion Post for each. As usual I hope you find more than one interesting selection in our group below. Make sure you scroll all […]

What happens when you ban freedom?

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook

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Banned Book Club is an interesting book. At first, I was not sure I liked or understood it. Yet, once I got deeper into it, I realized what was going on. I did wonder if this was based on anyone’s experiences, or a general look at the time. It is both. It is based on Kim Hyun Sook’s experiences and several experiences of others pulled into one story to protect those involved. Ko Hyung-Ju and Ryan Estrada due their parts to bring this graphic novel […]

This One Time, at Banned Camp…

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It’s Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s yearly event to spotlight attempts at censorship. If you have a censorship story to tell, we want to hear it. I come from a bookish people. My parents didn’t restrict my reading in any way and until I hit my tweens, I had never come across the concept of a book being “inappropriate.” At 12, I read well above my age group, within my age group, and was also a big fan of Clifford the Big Red […]

“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

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There is something particularly powerful about reading someone’s accounting of their dogged pursual of truth, of what is right, of what matters and we are treated to just that in Catch and Kill. In his second book Ronan Farrow reckons with the institutional powers and societal inequities that create the sort of stories he’s worked on reporting for the past few years at The New Yorker. Part memoir, part investigative report, Catch and Kill is an imminently fast read, jumping from one unbelievable if it […]



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