Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We owe fungi a lot, and you owe it to yourself to read this book

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

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This is a book about fungus. If you’re thinking “Huh, fungi are weird and I like learning new things,” you should pick up this book immediately. If you’re thinking “Ew, no. Mushrooms are gross,” you should pick up this book immediately because fungi (apparently!) are so much more than just mushrooms (which I learned are just the fruiting bodies of some fungi). In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake, which may be the greatest name ever, begins by walking the reader through the basics of what fungi are […]

Dune – A Father’s Perspective

Dune by Frank Hebert

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Dune is one of the fundamental texts of speculative fiction and I have probably read it a half dozen times over the years. Why re-read it now? I saw the trailer for the movie coming out later this year (and if you haven’t seen it, find it online, it is fantastic) and realized I had not read it since my kids were very little. I thought I might have a different perspective now that my youngest is a teenager and that was certainly true. When […]

“the potential of nothing is everything”

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

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This book sat on my bedside table for six months. I looked at it every day, tucked it into my work bag on multiple occasions, and brought it with me on several trips but I was unable to open the cover. I was paralyzed by the guilt of being wrapped into the attention economy, and I did not feel like I was ready or able to give my meager time to “nothing” quite yet. I was wrong. I wish I had cracked it open the […]

“But what do I know? I’ve only been around 4.5 billion years or so.”

AstroNuts Mission One: the Plant Planet by Jon Scieszka, Steven Weinberg

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cbr11bingo – Birthday! Earth is now on the brink of being inhabitable, and she’s got no bones to pick about telling us why. Luckily, as she reveals to us in her narration of AstroNuts, NNASA (Not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has been planning for just such an event, secretly creating four super-space soldier animal hybrids in their secret laboratory under Mount Rushmore. Blasting off in Thomas Jefferson’s Nose Rocket, AstroWolf, LaserShark, SmartHawk, and StinkBug launch their mission of finding an unoccupied Earth-like planet […]

A mythical world to inform on a real world problem

Aquicorn Cove by Katie O'Neill

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CBR11bingo – Science! Lana and her father used to live by the sea with her mother and Aunt Mae. But when Lana’s mother died, her father couldn’t bear to be near the place she loved most, so they moved into the city. After some time grieving, he brings Lana to visit Mae and the little fishing village they used to inhabit.  Lana is ecstatic to be back, even though the nature of their visit is also a big somber: they are helping the town recover […]

31: A new look at cities as ecological danger sites

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Having done a deep dive on scholarly books about ecology, I was intrigued by Ashley Dawson’s argument in Extreme Cities: cities are a major epicenter of ecological and natural disasters. I had not thought about cityscapes as being susceptible to natural disaster, but Dawes unpacks several interesting instances of disaster to show how cities highlight deep stratifications in our society. Dawes defines extreme cities as those that reveal the greatest disparity in economics and stability, and act as a site of ecological and economic disaster. […]



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