Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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An excellent anthology of disabled authors from a variety of perspectives.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century by ed. Alice Wong

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This was a solid collection of essays from voices rarely heard in publishing, or elsewhere. Ableism is baked into our culture. I read this for Read Harder this year, and this is why I like participating in that challenge every year, because there are always a couple books I probably would never have read otherwise, and this is one of those. Like most essay collections, there are essays that are stronger than others. The standouts for me were the very first essay by Harriet McBryde […]

Year of Penny? EXCUSE ME, LIFE of Penny!

The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson

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5/26 UPDATE: if you are curious and want to check out an excerpt, you can do so HERE! Do you miss Happy Endings? If you have seen the show, then the answer is obviously YES SO MUCH OH MY GOODNESS PLEASE COME BACK! If you have not seen the show, then what are you doing? Get out of here and inject all three seasons directly into your eyeballs before returning! Several days ago, the unfortunately canceled Happy Endings turned 10. 10! It seems like just yesterday, Alex […]

yes, but…maybe she’ll make an exception and WE can meet?

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

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My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all. First of all: same. Second: you must read this collection. Second–and-a-half: by read I mean listen. Samantha […]

It was always exactly that bad

Not That Bad by Roxane Gay

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] I tend to avoid books like this, because I suppose I’m yet another product of exactly what these essays address: Nothing that has ever happened to me has ever been that bad, and nothing makes that clearer than reading the experiences of others. But that’s the point of collections like these. It is that bad. It’s always been that bad. The fact that we have to consistently work to squash and minimize and fit and qualify and […]

“It’s because I’m tired of being branded a terrorist; tired that a human life lost in my country is no loss at all.”

Our Women on the Ground: : Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World by Zahra Hankir

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Looking back, I can’t quite remember how this book ended up on my TBR back in February 2020. It did though and I’m glad to have read it, even if it took me longer than I hoped to actually complete it. There is something incredibly valuable about learning a story from the person experiencing it; of seeking out authentic voices and sources. In bringing Our Women on the Ground, Zahra Hankir puts the voice of women journalists from the Arab world front and center, where […]

A Tolentino Gateway Drug

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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My boss bought me Trick Mirror, a collection of nine essays by The New Yorker, Jezebel, and The Hairpin writer Jia Tolentino, for my birthday this year. As usual, she’s gifted me something meaty to absorb that suits my tastes well. The collection of essays in Trick Mirror includes a range of topics spanning marriage, the 2016 election and Trump presidency, life as a teen reality tv ‘star’, Big Tech, and religion. But it’s not just a bunch of millennial naval-gazing reflection. This is a well-researched, sourced, […]



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