Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

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Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]

Attention all people who love Jane Austen, I have a good book for you.

Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

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I was just sort of expecting a fun book where the author points out passages in Austen’s work that adds credibility to the idea that Jane Austen was a radical thinker for her time. And that does occur here. (Radical, by the way, has a bit of a different usage here, in that it mostly means someone who is open to new ideas, and to rejecting the old if that is the right thing to do. That word has a negative association now that isn’t […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]

This should really be titled The Secret History of Wonder Woman’s Creators.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

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This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was pretty good all the same. I think this three star rating is due to two things: 1) I was expecting more of a history of Wonder Woman the character with some stuff about her creator(s) thrown in as well, and what I got was a history of her creator(s) in full, along with a healthy side order of what was actually going on in history at the time, with an emphasis on the history of feminism, […]

“Rooting around in the presidential innards”

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

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Listening to Assassination Vacation is like taking a road trip with your strangest friend. Well, Sarah Vowell is on a road trip- and is unabashedly strange- but having her narrate the journey to you is a little cozy, a little crazy, a little creepy- and a LOT of fun. Her morbid fascination with presidential assassins (both would-be and verified) and the zeal for putting friends and relatives into uncomfortable situations is a hoot, and the audio experience feels like gossiping with your own partner-in-crime. She […]

Let’s Start of the Year With a Little Non-Fiction

A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast Asia's Largest Nation by Tim Hannigan

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  As an Australian, I have long lamented the fact that we see ourselves as on the periphery of South East Asia rather than an integral part of the region. And while we spend our time at school mostly learning about the history of the ‘Anglosphere’, we seem to have very little curiosity about our neighbours – and this is rather disappointing. After reading This Earth of Mankind late last year, I realised that there were considerable gaps in my own knowledge of Indonesia, who […]



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