Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I feel, therefore I can be free.”

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

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  CBR Bingo: UnCannon Sister Outsider is a collection of essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, as well as including a couple travelogues from trips she took to Russia and Grenada. My formal education never included anything about or by Lorde, and so this is the first thing of hers that I’ve read. It was funny how many times I finished an essay and thought, “I bet this will be my favorite one in the book.” If you are willing to be open to what […]

“…loving Blackness enough to see its assets so that dark children matter.” Dr. Bettina L. Love

Hair Story by NoNieqa Ramos

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I’m having a hard time explaining just how much I loved this book, but I’m going to do my best. First off, Hair Story is own voices written & illustrated, and both the author, NoNieqa Ramos, and the illustrator, Keisha Morris, include their own hair stories at the back of the book, which was a lovely surprise.     Second, do you see these illustrations? The texture and colors and patterns and perfection of them?  You can see the love in that grandmother’s face, the joy in […]

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black – Lorraine Hansberry (

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black by Lorraine Hansberry

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CBR13Bingo – UnCannon Here’s a list: This random list of things Lorraine Hansberry liked and disliked is delightful. It’s important to know first what this book is: it’s a collection of quotes, snippets, excerpts from a variety of Lorraine Hansberry’s unpublished writing, and you need to go in knowing that it’s a gut punch. It was edited and published after she died by her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff. The collection involves various dialogues, bits of speeches, songs, ideas, thoughts and diaries not otherwise published in her […]

“The possibility of a botanist communicating with a tree was as thrilling as the possibility of a priest chatting with god.”

Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup

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Latitudes of Longing is a book that only made it to my list of books to read this year because of the Reading Women 2021 Challenge. The first task on the list is to read a book longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature which is an award presented each year to a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author. I went digging through the lists and Latitudes of Longing was both longlisted and shortlisted in 2018, the first year of the award. Latitudes […]

What do you tell your children? (CBR12Bingo: Uncannon)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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There’s a line from Lindy West’s Shrill that really resonated with me, in her case about her disillusionment with comedy, “Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.”  There’s truth to that for pretty much any intersectional thinking, and Between the World and Me is basically Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking directly to his teenage son about his long slow realization that the same is true of anti-racism.  His long, slow realization is that the Dream (capitalization his) of white […]

Close is no comfort

Close Range by Annie Proulx

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Annie Proulx can write.  I realize this should be apparent since she’s won a Pulitzer for writing, but this was the first work of hers that I read and I was blown away all the same.  Close Range is a short story collection set in Wyoming, with stories that vary in length (40 pages to 2 pages) but not in punch.  She sets her stories in the rural central and eastern part of the state, focusing on working class people- because its Wyoming this means […]



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