Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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CoffeeShopReader's Reviews:

Why you should make friends with the rat in your house

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

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My biggest problem with Fuzz is that the whole premise is kind of misleading; this is not really a book about animals breaking laws; it’s mentioned that elephants have killed people, rats and mice destroy agriculture (theft sort of) seagulls destroy the Easter flowers at St Peter’s in the Vatican, and deer cause a lot of traffic damage, but none of this seems to actually be the point. Fuzz is really a book about humans and animals not always getting along, basically there’s a lot […]

I’m So Done with This Series

The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life, vol. 5 by Usata Nonohara

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I totally only read this book to finish the story; I’d kind of given up on The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life but I wanted to see how the main group of heroes would save the day as they inevitably would (and did). One of the only reasons this conclusion to the question of will they be bale to defeat the Labyrinth and how isn’t a bad finish is because there’s not much of either Mariela or Sieg. Throughout the […]

No One to Really Root For but It’s Still Somehow Pretty Good

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

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She Who Became the Sun definitely lived up to the hype; the characters are interesting and complex, and there is plenty of action and plot. What bothered me was that there was really only one character who stood up for general human decency, not just “I must take charge of my destiny no matter what I have to do (including murdering innocent people and not so innocent people)”. The basic premise is pretty well known already: in a quasi historical early medieval China, a nameless […]

Which World is Really the Game?

Noble Roots by Drew Hayes

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One of my least favorite fantasy adventure tropes is the tournament arc; often there’s virtually no plot, no character development, just a lot of fights with miraculous and/or unexpected power-ups. About half of Drew Haye’s Noble Roots, books 5 of the Spells, Swords, & Stealth series, goes here. I suppose it was kind of inevitable that this happen since the series is based on two premises: what happens when you focus on the NPCs in a D&D-style game and their lives when they aren’t interacting […]

Not as much bang for the bosh

Bosh! On a Budget by Henry Firth, Ian Theasby

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Several years ago (pre-pandemic) I’d been to the UK for business, and gotten hooked on the Tesco (major grocery chain over there) lunch combo (sandwich, chips, and drink) with a specific sandwich: the Ploughman’s lunch. Basically, that’s a cheese sandwich with tomato, lettuce, and a very specific pickle-type spread. That spread is commonly available in the UK but not so much in the US, and a few weeks after getting home, I had a major craving for that sandwich. I found a recipe that’s quite […]

Unpretentious Mexican food book

Provecho by Edgar Castrejon

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I have cooked my way through a lot of international cuisine cookbooks, including India, Japan, Italy, Thailand, the UK. I think I may have found one for Mexico. Provecho has been on several “best of” lists, so I figured that it might be worth checking out. It’s surprisingly straightforward in terms of recipes and ingredients for being both vegan and Mexican. A lot books like this have some sort of introduction to key ingredients sections, but what sets this one apart is both how recognizable […]



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