Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


And I had such high hopes

Swamp Thing: Twin Branches by Maggie Stiefvater

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When I first heard of Swamp Thing: Twin Branches I figured it was going to be how the human who is to be Swamp thing became ST like the TV show of the 1980’s. (Good camp, bad everything else.) And like many of the DC graphic novels, Maggie Stiefvater was going to have a teen boy come of age and then, turn into part of nature. I thought it was going to be bittersweet but still nice. Afterall, I always thought that this creature was […]

“I love you, I think, and you are my home”

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

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CBR14 Bingo: Mind (Bee, as well as Ms. Hazelwood herself, is a neuroscientist and there’s a whole lot of brain science happening in the book) Bee Köningswasser, a young pink-haired neuroscientist, is offered pretty much her dream job on a NASA project and accepts joyfully. Her excitement is cut short when she realises that while she’s the lead on the neuroscience part, her nemesis from grad school, Levi Ward, is the engineering lead on the same project. Nevertheless, Bee can feel herself wasting away in […]

a book for everyone, and everyone should read a book

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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There is no one who isn’t the audience for this book. If you’re interested in science, there’s a lot of it in here. If you don’t know much science, you can skip some of the more technical elements of the book and just get the high level takeaways. If you’re scientifically inclined, you can luxuriate in all the math that Munroe casually throws into his answers. We’d all be better off if we took scientific advice when trying to solve our day to day problems, […]

Does a mama shark tell her kiddo to wait 30 minutes before swimming?

Mother of Sharks by Melissa Cristina Marquez

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I was lucky and recently had Mother of Sharks by Melissa Cristina Marquez fall into my lap (well, in my hands). Not due until late May/early June 2023, Marquez’s story is one we all need to know as it is not just about a woman, or a woman of color, or about science, or the ocean. It is all of that and a fun book to boot. Taking fiction and fact, she tells her story through the eyes of a young girl. We do not […]

See about the sea

The Ocean Is Kind of a Big Deal by Nick Suluk

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The Ocean Is Kind of a Big Deal is Nick Suluk’s latest creation. You might now them better as the Lars the Awkward Yeti author and illustrator, or the books The Brain Is Kind of a Big Deal and The Sun Is Kind of a Big Deal. The humor we know in Awkward Yeti is there, but the clever way of learning is added. The book is cartoon illustrations and for the higher preschool to first or second grader (the second grader might be a […]

After writing this, I learned we are still making breakthroughs in this field! 

Fever: How Tu Youyou Adapted Traditional Chinese Medicine to Find a Cure for Malaria by Darcy Pattinson

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Have you heard of Tu Youyou? She is a Chinese scientist who used traditional Chinese medicine to help cure malaria. And she was not from the 1800s or even early 20th century when we think of malaria research happening, but she was working during the late 1960s and 1970s in a People’s Republic of China task force. Therefore, relatively “new” in the grand picture. And not only did she and other scientists figure out the right ingredients, amounts, heat, and such, she was one of […]



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