Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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This was really interesting to read back to back with How to Be an Antiracist; they shed light on each other in weird ways. But they are also two very different books! My main takeaway from Caste is that Isabel Wilkerson is a great writer. I’m set to read her first book next month, and I’m now looking forward to it even more. She employs metaphor and other literary techniques in a way that you don’t normally see from non-fiction writers. It brings a depth […]

this woman’s work

If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley

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Bill Bryson’s delightful At Home: A Short History of Private Life came first, but Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk separates itself from the predecessor by being, well, more intimate! I promise this will be a review of If the Walls Could Talk, but if you are ever in need of a peaceful “sleep read” then I highly recommend plugging into the audio adaptation of Bryson’s book- it is seriously soothing. The biggest difference between At Home and If Walls Could Talk is the female perspective. Bryson’s book was framed around […]

“The victims of Jack the Ripper were never ‘just prostitutes’; they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. They were women. They were human beings, and surely that in itself is enough.”

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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When I think back to my experiences as an undergrad history major I was often one of very few, if not the only, women in the room. Each course was the same; walk in, pick a position near the front of the room, but off to the side so as to not be considered aggressive but not be lost in the sea of testosterone, and hunker down to have to talk over those who would talk over you. I eventually got to a place of […]



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