Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Architecture of Our New Digital Cage

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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  There’s a whole literary field of broken dreams on our addiction to smart phones. The Art of Surveillance Capitalism talks about how our data is harvested, Irresistible looks at how tech companies keep us hooked, while The Shallows shows how our concentration span is reduced. The Twittering Machine sits among these, but offers a different slant. What if we are being enslaved by our devices, what if they’re robbing us of our surplus value?   It’s a very Marxist critique of the rise of […]

Does this author ever write a bad book?

Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel

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Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel This graphic novel is not perfect, but it is darn close. There were just one or two small “bumps” for me. But overall fans will get a huge kick out of this. There is much happening and Bechdel uses their usual wit and observations to get the job done. Even if they cannot get the job of writing their new book or the TV script done. It is life during the years of 2020 to “now” (or around […]

Happy or Wealthy, But Not Both

Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies by Laura Thompson

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Though you’d think money smoothes away all obstacles, it seems in the lives of these heiresses to be the thing that stands between them and happiness. Using the examples of individual heiresses to make her case, Thompson shows how the lives of heiresses evolved with the times, and what they may need to achieve happiness in their different ways. The book is broken down into four sections which deal with different eras of heiresses, from the heiress abductions of the Georgian times to the American […]

A rush through the author’s experience

Home Body by Rupi Kaur

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Let me start by stating that my exposure to poetry is very limited. I have, to my knowledge, read only one or two full collections of poems, so take this entire review with a grain of salt. Home Body by Rupi Kaur is broken down into four parts: mind, heart, rest, and awake. In mind Kaur writes of her depression, anxiety, and her struggles with worth and acceptance. In heart, Kaur write of love: its loss, its elusion, and its impact. In rest, Kaur write of just that. […]

A Hundred Years On, It Still Mostly Holds Up

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin

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Best for: People interested in a sense of what the Marxist philosophers were saying in the 1900s. Admittedly a niche market at this point (for now, anyway). In a nutshell: The title basically nails it – Lenin argues that Imperialism is Capitalism at its end. Worth quoting: “..for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production.” Why I chose it: It was assigned as part of the Marxist […]

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 […]



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