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:

Tombs

Tombs by Junji Ito

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This is another Cannonball where I’m unfortunately not going to have a lot to say, mostly because the stories in this collection didn’t stick with me very intensely. Junji Ito remains the undisputed master of Japanese horror manga, but this would probably not be the story collection I would recommend to people who were new to or just becoming familiar with his work. For those, stick to Uzumaki, Tomie, Gyo, Shiver, or Fragments of Horror. The title story of Tombs details a brother and sister […]

The Mountain & The Sea

The Mountain & The Sea by Kwame Dawes

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I didn’t mean to read more Literature with a Capital L, but a coworker I like and trust recommended this book to me, citing its poetic prose, and hooboy is that an accurate assessment. This is exactly the sort of story that shows us why diversity in our authors is important. It tells the story of a Jamaican woman who, after a hurricane, finds herself hosting an amnesiac man, who she can’t help but notice is easy on the eyes. Romance ensues. I say this […]

The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander

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The second book in the Prydain Chronicles is also the name by which 90% of people are familiar with this story and the characters, because it shares the name with a Disney movie. The Disney movie in question is considered one of the blackest sheep in the entire library, because hooboy is it dark and scary. The villain is the Horned King, borrowed from the Book of Three and turned into a non-comical Skeletor. The Horned King’s dungeons, weird sidenote, are a marvel of background […]

The Book of Three

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander

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After reading a smidge too much big kid literature, I decided to reread one of my favorite YA book series of all time: The Chronicles of Prydain. I reread these stories at least half a dozen times in middle school through high school. They inspired my love of fantasy stories that persists to this day, and I can tell that the lessons they imparted were important, because they were hard for me to hear as a kid. The story is set in a half-history half-mythological […]

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

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The second in my Literature with a Capital L series, The Sun Also Rises is another Hemingway, this time featuring am early-thirties group of friends trundling around Europe having adventures consisting primarily of fishing, sex, and bull-fighting. I’m not going to rehash everything I said in my previous post, but my problem with Hemingway boils down to the fact that the Wikipedia plot summary for this book, aka what should be the most succinct summary you can find, begins with “on the surface,” suggesting that […]

Orochi Vol. 3

Orochi Vol. 3 by Kazuo Umezu

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I started reading Kazuo Umezu because Junji Ito is one of my favorite authors. Drifting Classroom was the best starting point because it was weird and misery porn and bloody (and poopy), but at least it has a strong narrative to follow. Orochi is a lot weirder and harder to recommend. In Orochi, the titular character is a strange woman who travels the world with strange powers. The powers are poorly defined. She can sort of touch someone with the tip of her finger and […]



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