Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About GentleRain

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Your jack of all trades eccentric. Knows a little about a lot and a lot about a little. Tends to mainly read non-fiction (history, true crime, old gossip, etc), SF/F, horror, graphic novels, "genre" books. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: GentleRain's Quick Questions interview.)

GentleRain's Reviews:

“I can’t help wondering whether I was born under a galaxy of lucky stars.”

I Married the World by Elsa Maxwell

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Elsa Maxwell is a curious figure in world history because she was famous for throwing amazing parties and being friends with famous people, but she also shows up in the background of other biographies and memoirs of the period with what can only be described as a dark air of menace — as in Philip Van Rensselaer’s Million Dollar Baby, where Elsa is portrayed as a person who lures rich young women into marriages with con artist playboys and then takes a cut of the […]

“Things have been going pretty well:” Famous Last Words in a Romance Manga

Our Sweet One-Room Apartment by Kamoburger

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Our Sweet One-Room Apartment is a solid one volume BL. Kaname and Shima have been living together in Hokkaido in the titular one room apartment for a year and have been dating for two. They love each other and have great sex all the time. However, Kaname starts worrying that them having sex so much and him thinking about it constantly means that he’s a sex addict and he starts pulling away from Shima so that they have sex less. Shima starts worrying that Kaname […]

“I can’t bring myself to tell people how I actually feel:” Realistic Romance Manga

Takahashi from the Bike Shop Volume 1 by Arare Matsumushi

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I’m really glad I gave this a shot because it’s a great start to a romance series and I’m excited to see where it goes from here. Takahashi from the Bike Shop focuses on the relationship between Tomoko Hanno and Ryouhei Takahashi. Tomoko works at a stressful job and has trouble saying no to anyone. She starts to get to know Ryouhei, whom she thinks is a complete delinquent at first due to his dyed hair and general demeanor, after he helps her fix her […]

“You’ve gotten the taste for excitement and adventure:” Great Sci-Fi/Fantasy by Ann Leckie

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

Translation State by Ann Leckie

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Ann Leckie is one of those authors that my brain just clicks with so well that I love everything she writes, like a warm bath for my mind. I always feel very comfortable reading her books because I can trust that she’s taking the plot somewhere that will work for me and that I’ll be satisfied with. She may not be on lists of cozy sci-fi, but it’s somehow cozy to me. I was therefore extremely thrilled to see a collection of her short works […]

The Original “Poor Little Rich Girl”

Million Dollar Baby by Philip Van Rensselaer

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I spent half of this book wondering if I’d read it before but enjoying it so much I dashed through it in about a day. It is very entertaining and readable, and you can understand why Barbara Hutton took on Philip as a companion. He is a fun narrator and gets across emotion and events very well. Million Dollar Baby is a biography of Barbara Hutton and a memoir the time that Van Rensselaer spent with her in the late 1950s. It is not at […]

“We’ll continue to hurt others and be hurt in the future too. And one day, something even worse might happen…We have a chance to change things for the better. If we raise a smart and courageous child.”

A Smart and Courageous Child by Miki Yamamoto

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It’s always thrilling to me to see a publisher trying something new, and Tokyopop publishing A Smart and Courageous Child strikes me as a bold move. They are not usually the publisher you expect to do literary manga, and finding this in the bookstore made my day. I am constantly pining for American publishers to translate more manga like this, aimed at adults and dealing with everyday life. There’s so much manga in Japan that is probably never going to get translated here, so anything […]



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