Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth.”

In Order to Live: a North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park, Maryanne Vollers

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First, I feel a little bad rating In Order to Live: a North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom three stars. Park’s life story to the point of her writing this book, just 21 years, is full of the sort of deprivations, suffering, drive to survive, and eventually hope that make you want to love the work. Yeonmi Park’s life deserves notice and her book deserves to be read. Unfortunately for me, it felt more like homework than a captivating read. Second, there are some books […]

Live a Bold Life

Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly by Deborah Noyes

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  We’ve reached the first book of the year that I read expressly because it fit a Read Harder Challenge. Task number one is to read a YA non-fiction. I did not have any juvenile non-fiction on my 650 books deep to read list, so I had to go looking. Nellie Bly had recently come up at work and I realized I knew very little about the famous reporter beyond her time in Blackwell or her around the world trip so onto my library request […]

“Love is scary: it changes; it can go away. That’s part of the risk.”

To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

Always and Forever, Lara Jean by Jenny Han

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With the release of the To All the Boys P.S. I Still Love You on Netflix this week I decided to give in and read the series. I really liked the first movie in 2018 but didn’t pick the books up then. I was smitten with the movie and didn’t want to mess with that feeling. But eighteen months later I felt the time had come. In To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before we are introduced to Lara Jean Song Covey, middle sister of […]

“And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it? Sometimes, even now, I still can’t.”

Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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Next up on my Diverse Romance reads is Red, White, & Royal Blue. McQuiston wrote Red, White, & Royal Blue with the intention of making it queer, and making it queer in the way she wished she had read for herself as she was finding her own identity. Her care shows in every step of the novel and its going to be tough for another book to be better than this one this year. Red, White, & Royal Blue has a great premise – what […]

“i’m pretty sure you have s t a r d u s t running through those v e i n s. – women are some kind of magic.”

The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

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In my review of Crimes of the Heart I took a potshot at Poetry as a genre, mostly because it has had a high barrier of entry to me in the past (graphic novels/comics has been my other major hurdle) but in fairness I have gotten better at finding poetry that works for me in at least part due to all the reading challenges I do that require poetry. In 2018 I read two collections I quite enjoyed, No Matter the Wreckage and Depression & […]

Reading Plays Just Isn’t For Me

Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley

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I hate reading plays. I HATE IT. We don’t expect people to have great literary experiences reading movie scripts, but we do with plays. I do reading challenges every year (this one is for Reading Women) for the express purpose of making my reading more diverse, so I’m not going to let plays defeat me if poetry hasn’t in years past. But I did not enjoy a single minute of it. I’m still rating this three stars because it isn’t the play’s fault I’m not […]



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