Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Still No Kids For Me, Thank You

Why Have Kids by Jessica Valenti

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I first became aware of Jessica Valenti back around undergrad when I started reading a few feminist blogs, Feministing being one of them.  Feministing was never my favorite one – it was more like reading a collection of news, reporting on lots of different things with multiple posts a day while other blogs had fewer articles but more in depth analysis of those topics. I don’t remember if Valenti stood out to me, or if she even posted that much or was more involved in […]

No.

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

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I have been providing quotations from the books I am reading as the headline for each of my reviews. Same here. One conceit in the novel is that probing questions about choices involving having a child or not are answered in the style i Ching of flipping a coin yes/no. So this is a quotation. It’s also my review. No thank you. I should have known going in, but as the narrator suggests “I thought the book was a trick, but it tricked me” or […]

Please excuse me while I furiously try to make my cannonball goal

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The joys of motherhood brilliantly illustrates why we write entire novels. Sometimes worlds, feelings, transitions, people, countries cannot be captured by a sole sentence or even a review. This books wrenched my heart, stole my breath and carried me through hope and despair, lives and worlds. It made me reevaluate my relationships with other people. It made me mourn the depravity of the world. It made me dance with hope of the good in life. “In Ibuza sons help their father more than they help […]

An Important Voice

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I’m taking a non-fiction elective this semester, and one of our required readings is “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.” I knew nothing about it before opening it, and as a person who’s already a little bit terrified at the idea of someday being responsible for the survival of another human being, this book hit me hard. The prose is absolutely beautiful. Cusk’s words flow out naturally and accessibly even as she’s unpacking serious emotion, and I blew through this book in about two […]

A book about friendship, motherhood and pies

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Veronica Russo lives in Boothbay Harbour in Maine. She’s a waitress at the local diner and also makes insanely delicious pies, that are very popular among the people in town. She even has pie-making classes. When she was sixteen, she got pregnant and had to give her baby up for adoption. She still feels as if some of the people she grew up with judge her for this, but is trying to get on with her life. She can’t help but think about the baby […]

Motherhood, am I right?

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I reviewed another of Jessica Valenti’s books (“The Purity Myth”) for last year’s Cannonball Read, and she actually acknowledged my review on Twitter. That was a very happy day. I knew about this book but hadn’t read it; I discovered it on Audible on Friday ended up listening to it pretty much straight through. Ms. Valenti is a feminist author and mother of her young daughter Layla. Layla was born SUPER early, spending her first weeks in the NICU. Ms. Valenti spends time talking about […]



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