Cursed Princess Club v.1 by LambCat
I saw Cursed Princess Club v.1 on a shelf and thought it looked interesting but left it there; then I was reminded of this title by a fellow Cannonballer, and decided that maybe I wanted to pick it up. Turns out I didn’t remember which store I’d seen it in, so I ordered it, then saw it on the shelf again two days before I got it. By this point, there was a second review. I agree with both of them. The art style is […]
The Icepick Surgeon Murder Fraud Sabotage Piracy and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science by Sam Kean
The Icepick Surgeon is not bedtime reading, unless you want really weird dreams. I enjoy popular science reading, especially when there’s some narrative, and this book is both those things. Basically it’s a review of mostly the past 275 years of medical history and the ugly things people have done and tried to justify in the name of science or helping people in the future. There’s a lot of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piracy and grave robbing involved, a good bit of slavery and racial history, […]
Dust and Grim by Chuck Wendig
I’ve had Dust & Grim on my TBR for a little while, and when I was in the bookstore for one thing online said they had but they didn’t, I didn’t want to leave sans book, so I picked up this. Overall, it’s a decent spooky middle grade/YA tale about newly discovered siblings and the family business, a funeral home for the supernatural; don’t say “monster”, that’s offensive. The only real problem was that I did not ever really take a liking to the main […]
The Tacky South by Katherine A. Burnett, Monica C. Miller
Popular scholarship seems to be kind of a newer genre; by this I mean essays by trained scholars that are scaled back a bit in terms of scope and depth, and done in styles that people without academic inclinations might find readable. Often, these kinds of works also tend to be on subject of interest to the general public that have something to do with popular culture. The Tacky South is one such collection. The authors of the various essays use sometimes rather different definitions […]
Masa: Techniques, Recipes, and Reflections on a Timeless Staple by Jorge Gaviria
I’ve started trying to have a new cookbook at the beginning of the year and try to work my way through all or most of it; there’s a bit of a backlog on this and I’m finally getting into a Mexican vegan book I got (and reviewed) last year. Before starting into it, I saw Masa: Techniques, Recipes, and Reflections on a Timeless Staple on some ‘top books of …’ lists, and I figured that might be a good accompaniment to really get into some […]
Mission Yozakura Family vol. 1 by Hitsuji Gondaira
So I read a preview chapter of this new mange last year, and later when I wanted some kind of mindless entertainment I went and got the published first volume of Mission: Yozakura Family. The premise is almost as goofy as the story: painfully shy and traumatized Taiyo can hardly function in school except with his childhood friend the pretty and popular Mutsumi Yozakura. It turns out she’s part of a family of spies and they end up “married” to save both of them from […]