Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The film is WAY better than the book

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

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#CBR12 Bingo: Adaptation (was turned into a movie in 2015 – the film is way better than the book) (Can also be read for Debut) Official book description: Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics.   Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel.   Rachel has been […]

Ironically titling this review ‘A Good Book’.

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

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This is one of those books that the more it sits with you, the worse you think of it. And I liked the book at first! It’s written in an engaging style, and the characters seem likable at first. It’s also not a long book, so it doesn’t feel like a burden to pick up. I got it as my April pick for Book of the Month, a particularly slim month for interesting choices, so I thought I would branch out a little from my […]

Kind of wondering what Queenie would think of current events?

Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams

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Official book description: Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to […]

Desperate for answers, I tore through this book – and then there were no answers.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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Desperate for answers, I pretty much blocked out the world to finish this book as fast as I could – and then there were no answers. Susan Choi as an author is a neutral higher power who knows what you want and then calmly chooses not to give it to you, leaving you spinning in place and trying dumbly to figure out what on earth just happened. “Think, use your brain, you’ve got this.” This makes it sound like I disliked the book. I did […]

“When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind.”

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

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3.5 stars Official book description: August Pullman wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things. He eats ice cream. He plays on his Xbox. He feels ordinary – inside. But Auggie is far from ordinary. Ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go. Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life, in an attempt to protect him from the cruelty of the […]

Stories from the 1% (no not THAT one)

I Can Make This Promise by Christine Day

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Recently I was lucky to present at our state comic con on Teen Girls in Space, and one of the focuses of my panel contributions was diversity in pop culture. I got to really dig into the still terrible statistics of representation in literature and media, and while it was nice to see the numbers getting better, all in all it is a “long way to go” situation – unsurprising to any Pajiban and Cannonballer, I am sure. Of the many major bummers, one super-major […]



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