Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Anger is powerful, but care for one another is, too.”

On the Line: a Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union by Daisy Pitkin

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I had some unexpected travel last week and grabbed the nearest library book to read on the plane. On the Line: a Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union had come to my attention due to a pro-union cat on twitter (@jortsthecat – which if you haven’t encountered, I promise he and Jean are worth taking a quick deep dive). I don’t know if it was the time/place I was reading it, or my affection for the recommending source […]

Beware of Bored Women!

Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov

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ESPECIALLY if you are the one to damn them into a life of boredom. I sought out this short story after being utterly enthralled by the 2016 Florence Pugh tour-de-force Lady Macbeth. If you are a sucker for a brutal period drama chock full of female desperation-disguised-as-power, then hustle your bustle to your  nearest ye olde video rental and check. it. out. The film is phenomenal, and I was immediately curious about the source material! A little Wikipedia creeping led me to Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk […]

Despite the title of the book, this was not a good time

Bacchanal by Veronica G. Henry

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BINGO – Travel The G. B. Bacchanal Carnival is a travelling carnival that makes stops all around the Great Depression Era South. They have everything a carnival should: tasty treats, games that may or may not be rigged, dangerous feats from dazzling performers, and oddities from around the world. This carnival just happens to be owned by a demon from the underworld who feeds on children’s souls trying to find the one person who can stop her. Liza Meeks is the newest addition to the […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

A Landmark Read

Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis

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Last month, when I was looking to try reading Angela Davis’ work, Women, Race, & Class was the primary recommendation. At the time, my local libraries were closed and this one was heavily borrowed via e-reader, so I picked up the available Are Prisons Obsolete? It was very good, giving me a concise history of penitentiaries and made me reconsider prison abolition. But I was still eager to get to this one and got excited when I saw it available. It was worth the wait. Davis does such […]

The Poor Have Always Been With Us

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HALF CANNONBALL! I picked this audio book off the shelf at a library wine tasting because of it’s catchy Title. I mean, how can you see the glaring title, “White Trash,” and not be intrigued? And I haven’t listened to an audio book in a while, so it seemed like a good idea. And it was, mostly. White Trash chronologically unpacks the history of white poverty in America from the 1600s to 2012. Isenberg begins with the English penal colonies where the British government literally rounded […]



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