Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.”

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

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I have in the past frequently compared books to food because I find it helpful. I love both books and food in the way that only comes from consuming something, putting it inside yourself and making it a part of you, quite literally. There’s the immediate pleasure of the consumption itself, and then there’s the afterward, when the food or the ideas do things to you (good, bad or in between; small or large scale). I have previously compared books to cotton candy and burritos […]

Needed more groveling.

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

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Mixed feelings about this one! Overall, I liked it. Parts of it I liked a lot. Other parts made me hopping mad. The premise of this book is extremely silly, but the authors manage to make it work, and ground it in something real, so that’s always fun to have happen. Olive Torres is an identical twin, and her sister Ami is getting married. Olive also hates her sister’s husband’s brother, Ethan, and they have disliked each other for years. Due to food allergies and […]

“Being poor, living in poverty, seemed a lot like probation – the crime being a lack of means to survive.”

Maid by Stephanie Land

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This was good, but I’m not going to shout to the rooftops over it. I can’t say I was really disappointed by expectations on this one, because I didn’t have any. It was only until about halfway through that I found myself wishing the book was something else, and that’s not the author’s fault. The cover and blurb are sort of misleading. This isn’t a book about what it’s like to be a maid, with hard-hitting social criticism or research. It’s a straight-up memoir about […]

“into every life a little poop must fall”

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

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There’s something about reading Stephen King that really fuels my creativity. And this was a good collection. The real star of these four novellas is the titular If It Bleeds, a direct sequel to The Outsider, but I think I might have actually liked it better than that book. We get some classic themes from Uncle Stevie here but he adds a modern spin to most of them that was interesting, even if some worked better than others for me. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone — 3.5 […]

A bit of a bummer after the high of #9.

The Long Way Home (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #10) by Louise Penny

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Actually, I’ve slept on it, and this book makes me angry. My initial review was a little wishy-washy, because for 95% of this book, the writing is like an experimental offshoot of the normal series. There is no crime to solve; Gamache is retired. Instead, Peter has failed to come home on time after his and Clara’s separation, and Clara wants to find him, so Gamache, Beauvoir, and Myrna accompany her on an investigation road trip to basically follow in his footsteps. Only, pretty much […]

“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like.”

Little Fuzzy (Fuzzy Sapiens, #1) by H. Beam Piper

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Reading this back to back with Scalzi’s reinterpretation was an interesting experience, not least because the differences were really clear, but what was different was somehow surprising. I’ve read several classic sf books this year, and though they have shared varying tones and subject matters, they share a certain cultural sensibility. This is a very humanist little book, conscious of questions of personhood and exploitation, but it’s also a bit paternalistic. The basic plot here, shared by Fuzzy Nation, is that Jack Holloway is a […]



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