Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About jmsudar

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JM Sudar dreams of someday walking into a bookstore and seeing a book of his own for sale. After hearing his wife lament that she forgot to write her Cannonball review _again_, he decided to pick up a controller and give it a try himself.

jmsudar's Reviews:

The Castle of Llyr

The Castle of Llyr by Lloyd Alexander

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The Castle of Llyr, in addition to having the most Welsh name in the Prydain Chronicles, introduces one of the best characters in the book series: the gigantic mountain cat, Llyan. You can always tell when an author loves cats and is writing from their own experience, including terrible, willful behavior peppered with affection that is almost lethal. Diana Wynn Jones is another classic author for this sort of thing. The story begins at Caer Dallben, when the Princess Eilonwy gets the worst news imaginable: […]

Howl’s Moving Castle

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones

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Howl’s Moving Castle is some of the most dangerous media you will ever consume, because it’s more addictive than caffeine. Reading the book or watching the excellent Hiyao Miyazaki movie guarantees you will want to either watch or read whichever one you didn’t just consume, and this process repeats back and forth theoretically forever. And it’s wonderful the whole time. The novel takes place in a fairy tale world in all the best ways. Ingary resembles Europe immediately prior to World War I. Most technology […]

Orochi Vol. 4

Orochi Vol. 4 by Kazuo Umezz

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Orochi Vol. 4 continues the anthology tales of Orochi, the strange and supernatural woman who inserts herself into the difficult lives of the people around her, sometimes introducing extra havoc, but always trying to help the best she can. In the first story, Eyes, the main character is blind and bears blind witness to a murder by a local mobster. Terrified, she tries her best to help, but nobody believes her apart from the young boy who helps her with errands. It’s a tense read, […]

The History of the Computer

The History of the Computer by Rachel Ignotofsky

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The History of the Computer is exactly what it sounds like, and it does a wonderful job. Over the course of the book it highlights the beginnings of algorithmic thinking via Ada Lovelace, through the mainframe computers like UNIVAC, up to a forward looking take on modern computing that, shockingly, already feels a little outdated because it was written pre-ChatGPT, and many of the things it speculates about with generative AI are already coming true. This is another one where I really can’t say a […]

Dune, The Graphic Novel Vol. 1

Dune, The Graphic Novel Vol. 1 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

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Dune is the sort of fiction I can and have consumed in as many forms of media as I can reach: the original novel, two movies, a TV show, and now a graphic novel series. There is so much imagination and fantastic imagery in this series that consuming different versions can be an entirely different window into the series from another. So was adding an additional window worth it? Yes. Why? The worms. The Sandworms in Dune are one of its key features (only more […]

Working Boats

Working Boats by Tom Crestodina

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, I love cross-section books. The works of Steven Biesty are some of my all-time favs to revisit. The intricate detail, Wimmelbinder fun of finding all the things in a lively and complex drawing is very soothing to certain noisy parts of my brain. As such, after I’d checked out at one of my favorite local bookstores, and saw Working Boats on the shelf post-checkstand, with its cross-section of an OSHA research vessel on the cover, I grabbed a copy and looped back through the […]



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