Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A science heavy debunking of contemporary gender essentialism.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

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I tried to read this book near the beginning of quarantine, in hard copy, and my poor overloaded brain just couldn’t handle it. If I had read this in audio, a format my brain can handle for serious subjects, I probably would have rated it much higher, and gotten through it much faster (and I’ll be honest, retained more than 10% of it). So take this review with a grain of salt. (P.S. I just googled that phrase, and it evolved from something Pliny the […]

Advanced Bird Nerdery

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg by Tim Birkhead

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With the exception, perhaps, of the most dedicated vegan, all of us have cracked open an egg at some point in our lives: to scramble for breakfast, to make an egg drop soup, or, for those more reckless in our diet, to whip up a rich creme brûlée. Yet how many of us have ever paused to wonder about the complex mechanisms that go into the creation of the egg itself? A 19th-century abolitionist named Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said, “If required on pain of death […]

Better than the others, but still not a book I loved

A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole

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3.5 stars Naledi “Ledi” Smith’s parents died when she was very little, and she was shuffled through a series of foster homes her entire childhood. She learned to rely on no one but herself. When she keeps getting persistent e-mails about some African country named Thesolo and how she’s the crown prince’s intended, she obviously assumes that these communications are spam and deletes them all. Now she’s working hard to get her degree in epidemiology and waitressing on the side, in between worrying about her […]

Science Lesson Via Storytelling

Cells at Work! Vol. 5 by Akane Shmizu

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It seems like Cells at Work! 5 was a surprise as in it was surprising that this was the apparently last entries in the original series; I had seen the pre-order for a vol. 6 that apparently got canceled for vague reasons. There does appear to be a spin off though, so the series isn’t exactly over. I don’t know what happened there, but vol. 5 does kind of seem like someone may have gotten a little tired or distracted by another project because it […]

Why not distract yourself from the workings of the world with the workings of your own insides?

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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…or more frequently, the misfiring insides of others. Fistulated fellows? Check. Elvis and his mega-colon? Check. Taste-testing pet food, pus, rancid oil, and/or the saliva of others? All yours and more to spare! I like to, for the most-part, enjoy nonfiction via audio books. Frequently, I wander around the house doing whatever needs doing while playing books through a speaker. While I whole-heartedly recommend Gulp, I do NOT recommend subjecting innocent bystanders (sorry, husband!) to the dirty work within. Not everything here is gross. And really, […]

Buzz buzz and swarm away

Beehive by Jorey Hurley

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At first, I did not like Beehive. It is a larger picture book with just one word (swarm; keep, etc) per page. It is not until the end and the authors note that you actually get “something” that is solid. This tells you why the words that were used are important to bees. This is a page of facts and information that finally make this book more than what should be in a board book. Jorey Hurley’s book most likely will help with sight words […]



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