Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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An emotional YA in verse

Forever is Now by Mariama J. Lockington

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This book is such an emotional ride and I found it near-impossible to put down. Sadie has been coping with her generalized anxiety for years, but after she watches cops unjustly attack a young Black woman, she is suddenly finding it impossible to walk down the front stairs because “what if what if what if.” As she works on coping and healing and adding new tools to her tool box, Sadie is also trying to use her platform and her voice to bring more attention […]

Anti-Fat Bias Is Real

You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon

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Best for: Fat people looking for solidarity and words they can use when faced with anti-fat bias. Thinner people who need to learn some truths. In a nutshell: Writer and podcaster Gordon shared 20 well-researched essays tackling myths related to fatness and anti-fat bias. Worth quoting: “The cultural mandate for fat people to lose weight isn’t about health — it’s about power and privilege.” “Doctors’ prejudices mean they provide fat patients with lesser care, in turn, leading fat patients to less accurate diagnoses and less […]

Remember the nothing class of Home Ec? Turns out it’s got a past.

The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger

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What do chemistry, business, politics, and social justice have in common? I’m betting that no one would have automatically though “Home Economics!” but that’s exactly what The Secret History of Home Economics show. It all started with Catharine Beech, Olivia Washington (3rd wife of Booker T.), and Ellen Swallow in the late 1800s where educational opportunities for women were few and far between. By contextualizing studying chemistry as women as a way to develop better household practices, these ladies and more like them developed one […]

Do not read this hungry

The Inspired Vegan by Bryant Terry

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell if The Inspired Vegan is a cookbook, a set of media recommendations, or a social justice manifesto. Bryant Terry is a recognized advocate for all 3 things though, so it makes sense he’d combine them. One of the more interesting things about this book is how it’s set up, seasonally but also by menu. Each menu has some noted inspirations, usually musical or literary but also sometimes a film gets in there too. Individual recipes also have their own soundtrack […]

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.” (Bingo Blackout & Cannonball!)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

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Books have answers, and that is one of the reasons I love them. The past few years I’ve spent some time digging into me, and how I work, and how much of what I have presented to the outside world was authentic, and how much was what I had been expected to do. I had some knowledge of aces and asexuality before reading this particularly as one of my friends is ace and has been out for at least the decade I’ve known her, probably […]

“Sylvia did reach her dream of becoming a ballerina. And it all started with one determined girl with one library book from one bookmobile.”

Ready to Fly: How Sylvia Townsend Became The Bookmobile Ballerina by Lea Lyon & A. LaFaye, Illustrations by Jessica Gibson

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We’re gonna start off today’s review by (potentially? I don’t think I’ve talked about this here before) learning a new thing about NTE: I used to be a dancer. Before my body decided that anything that required even standing was completely out of the question (so from age 3-15, basically), being a dancer was a major part of my identity. I danced five days a week – tap, ballet, jazz, lyrical, contemporary, & pointe. Pointe was – by far – my worst class (I had […]



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