Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About bjornsnipe

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Books have been a part of my life from a very young age . I'm currently being ruled over by 3 cats (Rafferty, Bodhi Rook & Yersinia Pestis), who I can mostly get not to chew on book covers. Lately, I'll read anything, though Science Fiction and Romance will always be on the bottom of the pile.

bjornsnipe's Reviews:

“Come away, O, human child! To the woods and waters wild, With a fairy hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Irish Fairy Tales by D.L. Ashliman

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It’s nice to have a collection of tales you don’t get to read that often. There are forty-six tales divided into four different categories: Romance & Tragedy, Heroes & Giants, Fairies & Sea-Folk, and Supernatural Forces. These cover four of the six main genres of Irish Folk Tales: Myths, Legends, Magic Tales, and Literary Fairy Tales. They say Magic Tales instead of Fairy Tales, because not every story that has magic in it also includes a fairy which I think is a bit hoity-toity, but […]

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The Devil's Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by Randall Sullivan

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This book is described as a cultural, historical and religious study of evil and the Devil; how various civilizations throughout History have viewed the concept of an “ultimate evil”, and references several major literary, religious and historical figures, from the Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleister Crowley, and many more, among them Charles Baudelaire, whose story “The Generous Gambler” is where Sullivan got the title. With a side trip into the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980’s, Mexican […]

“My son, I loved my native land with energy and pride ‘Til a blight came over all my crops and my sheep and cattle died”

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine by Padraic X. Scanlan

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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by the pathogen phytophthora infestans. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and causing millions more to emigrate. It was not until 2020 that the population of Ireland hit pre-Famine levels again. Padraic X. Scanlan covers how Ireland got to the point of the majority of its inhabitants being solely dependent on the potato crop […]

“Dance, Dance, Dance, AS IF, tomorrow we all shall die!”

Disco Witches of Fire Island: A Novel by Blair Fell

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It’s 1989 and half-Armenian Philly resident Joe Agabian is trying to get over the death of his boyfriend Eddie, who he lost two years ago to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When his best friend Ronnie gets them jobs on Fire Island, Joe figures this is the perfect chance to finally start living again. Once there, they are taken under the wings of Larry and Howie, two older quirky and eccentric gay men who work as house cleaners for the rich of Fire Island. As Joe starts […]

“One news came straight huddling on another Of death and death and death”

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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(Shown with Black Death the Giant Microbe and Yersinia Pestis, the Oriental Shorthair; yes, I am indeed that sick.) I’ve had a fascination with the Black Death, aka Yersinia Pestis, ever since I took several summer courses at a local university as a child. The professor had two main classes; The Middle Ages, which covered everything from Ladyhawke to the Black Death, and Unsolved Mysteries, which covered everything from Jack the Ripper, to the Romanovs, to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.  I suppose this says a […]

The Glen, which the keeper’s daughter was seen to enter, but never known to quit, still frowns darkly as of yore; while an ineradicable bloodstain on the oaken stair yet bids defiance to the united energies of soap and sand

The Ingoldsby Legends Vol. 1 by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Harris Barham)

The Ingoldsby Legends Vol. 2 by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Harris Barham)

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Thomas Ingoldsby was the alias of Richard Harris Barham, a Cleric for the Church of England. In between his sermons (he at one time had a minor canonry at St. Paul’s Cathedral), Barham collected Kentish folklore, which he transcribed as pastiches as “The Ingoldsby Legends” in Bentley’s Miscellany, an English magazine edited by Charles Dickens. Most of the stories are written in prose, poking fun at famous plays, books, and people of the day, and were illustrated by various artists such as George Cruikshank (a […]



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