Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About J

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Just a girl, sitting in front of a book, wanting it to be good.

J's Reviews:

Do it for the photo, for the art, for the creativity–but never for the likes.

Hashtag Authentic: Finding creativity and building community on Instagram and beyond by Sara Tasker

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I tend to hang out in relatively niche corners of Instagram. As such, I came to Hashtag Authentic completely unaware of Sara Tasker and her Instagram feed. Never heard of her, and her images don’t show up in my Explore feed. But the description of Tasker as an “Instagram coach” twigged my curiosity enough to make me want to read this. What this book is: A gorgeous primer on the hows and whys of Instagram. Tasker teaches basic lessons in photography for social media. (If […]

The dog on the cover is a bit of bait and switch, but the romance is warm cookies from the oven goodness.

Heartbreaker by Inara Scott

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This book made me do a little happy dance. We’ve got grown-up leads with great chemistry and actual character growth, and we’re all set up for a fun sequel. Mason Coleman, stunningly handsome San Francisco VC, is taking care of his sister’s very large, very lazy, very untrained mastiff and doesn’t have time for this because his job is being a stunningly handsome San Francisco VC. Tess Papion is a non-traditional student just barely hanging on with three jobs, one of which is being a […]

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

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It takes three books to officially make it a theme, yeah? Amazon pushed Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia at me after I finished Song of Achilles and Circe, and it fit perfectly in my left-side-takes-on-mythology streak. LeGuin plucks Lavinia, the last wife of Trojan refugee Aeneas, from a single mention in Virgil’s poem and crafts a world around her. In her hands, Lavinia comes alive as a beloved daughter of a beloved king who marries a foreigner and becomes a mother of Rome. Lavinia comes of age […]

What if you threw an apocalypse and no one came? Aw-kward.

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Don’t you hate when you sit down for a drink at a bar and a Valkyrie approaches you to ask a favor? Ikepela Ives can relate. Ever since her parents dropped the bombshell that Ives is the world’s designated Fate Cipher–whatever that means–Ives has been trying to keep off the radar of everything supernatural. Unfortunately, Ragnarok is about to kick off and Ives might be the only one who can stop it. Ives starts to track down Loki and his children (the central characters in […]

What was the sense in love if all those you cared for were taken away?

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In keeping with my current run of reading historical fiction, The Lost Queen is an engaging read. It’s slow, and it ultimately builds to an abrupt end that fails to satisfy. Languoreth is a fortunate girl born into interesting times. She is a twin, born under good omens to a witch of the Old Ways (the book calls them Wisdom Keepers, you may know them as Druids) and a fair and wise petty king. (Caveat: “fair and wise” according to what that would have meant […]

All this, and Helen ends up back with her husband anyway

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I should have read The Iliad in college. It was assigned for a first year seminar for which I did less than half the reading. I’ve long been embarrassed by this fact, yet not at all motivated to make up the deficit. When I came to Song of Achilles, I had no idea who the narrator was, or his relationship to Achilles. I wonder if that’s a not insignificant portion of how beautiful I found this book, that I came to it unspoiled. Just as […]



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