Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Misery Porn of the Month

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

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For my birthday (January 19th), my fiancee surprised me with a year’s subscription to Book of the Month. From January’s options, I chose Black Cake, partly because it spoke to me the most, but mostly it was chosen at random for the thrill of it. A couple days later, I had my book and at least a half dozen emails from BOTM, including one suggesting the app and another hours later asking if I’d downloaded the app yet. In other words: pros, fast delivery, and […]

My love for the beautiful cover did not translate to love, or even like, of the book.

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

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I AM NOT ALLOWED TO GET LIT-FIC FROM BOOK OF THE MONTH ANYMORE*. I am completely unable to judge this book on it own merits because I was so unenthused while reading it, and the style really put me off. People are absolutely shitting themselves over this one, and it sounded so interesting to me, I’m upset I didn’t get anything out of it. *Except, this one time they had The Vanishing Half? And I loved that book. Maybe I will just make my rule […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]

A ghost story, almost-horror-novel-but-not, for people who don’t really like ghost stories or horror. And people who do!

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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I don’t normally do ghost stories, but I recently joined Book of the Month, and this was the only one of January’s books that seemed like something I might really like, so I ordered it. Plus it was also being touted as a mystery and a thriller, it fit well with my January theme of reading books by and about badass ladies (double check on that here) and with my run of books about shitty men doing bad things to women and girls. Also it’s […]



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