Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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CoffeeShopReader's Reviews:

Second Chances Sometimes Are Worth It

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

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I had flipped through The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England in a bookstore and decided it didn’t look great. I’m not a big fan of first-person narrating, and I saw a now mildly spoilery part about 2/3 of the way in that seemed dumb, so I put is back. Fast-forward about 6 months and I see the same nook at the library. On a whim, I decided to give it another chance. I’m actually kind of glad that I did. Our narrator wakes […]

DNF the Current Majorly Buzzed Bestseller

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

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I hate the DNF but in this case it was doubly necessary. I should have known better given my luck with literary fiction, but The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store had a good opening segment preview and it was at the local library. DNF reason 1: it’s due back at the library tomorrow because it’s part of a special set of books where you can get a relatively recent release on a shorter lend with no renewals. DNF reason 2: I totally lost interest after […]

Keeping some hope alive

Hooky, vols. 1-2 by Miriam Bonastre Tur

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One of the cardinal sins of any kind of story for me is to be misleading in terms of the general tone and approach it takes. For example, there’s this one anime series I watched years ago (I don’t even remember the title now) that was mostly a lighthearted cute series about the relationship between a boy and this mysterious robot girl he finds. Then suddenly, two episodes from the end it turned completely dystopic, dark, and tragic and pointless. I hated that and it […]

Ian Flemming Goes Cozy and Slightly Comedic

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

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I don’t know how John Scalzi would feel about his work being labeled “cozy” but that’s basically what Starter Villain is, a cozy adventure riffing in Scalzi fashion this time on the James Bond spy thriller. If you’ve read any of Scalzi’s more recent work, especially The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain will be kind of familiar. Take a down on his luck smarter than he might initially appear regular person, a former journalist now substitute teacher named Charlie, and throw him into an improbably […]

Bean Counting Lesson Book with Monkey Bread and Some Other Stuff

Hungry as Hell by Bad Manners LLC

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I’m still not quite sure about how I feel about the Bad Manners brand series of vegan cookbooks. On the one hand, the first one had a lot of good recipes in it, but the brand had some major issues with racial insensitivity and it took several years for that to get addressed publicly. Then, under the rebrand, a lot of random cussing does not equate bad manners, so that didn’t quite fit, and the tone was different, like the cursing was different and just […]

Where are my footnotes?

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner

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Bingo 25: On the air I first heard of Freakonomics as an NPR show; I think the radio (aka air-waves) form fits this concept better than the written. Firstly, every chapter in the book opens with some reference to the brilliance of the economist author (the other author is a journalist); granted Steven Levitt does seem pretty unconventional as an economist and I do think his novel approach leads to really interesting insights. However, the repeated reminders of his brilliance start to get irritating. The […]



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