Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Two Towers: Pippin is just a stand-in for Tolkien’s son right?

The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

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I’m back from my second visit to OG Middle Earth and I have thoughts. Remember, you brought this on yourselves. I remember noticing a difference in Star Trek once Roddenberry was no longer involved. He was really hung up on the idea that there can’t ever be conflict among the crew, because in his perfect future, we’ve literally grown out of interpersonal conflict. And it was *boring* because it didn’t make sense. Even in a perfect world, it is impossible for there never to be […]

Ending junk science about your junk

The Vagina Bible by Dr Jen Gunther

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Long, long overdue review of essential reading for anyone with a vagina or anyone who loves a person with a vagina. Dr. Gunther is waging a war on sexist, ignorant misinformation that prevents women from (1) loving their very normal bodies, (2) understanding their bodies, (3) and getting the care they need when their bodies are in trouble. This books cuts through the bullshit to tell you what medicine knows today, what it doesn’t know, and to beg you to stop steaming your vagina. It does this without […]

“This is for the people of the sun”

You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue

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  I honestly just thought of leaving the lyrics to RATM’s “People of the Sun” as my review for this strange, hallucinatory story of the first meeting between two global empires. It’s a fictionalized account of Hernan Cortes’ arrival in the city of Tenochtitlan and meeting with Monteczuma. Without spoiling too much, I’ll say there is a critical change to the true story. It’s a picture of a moment in history that bears little resemblance to American history books but is no less worth reading. […]

A hockey romance with less hockey and more coping with grief

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

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CBR16 Sweet Books: Exciting (I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and was VERY excited to get an ARC shortly before the release date. Nowhere Bingo: A book with multiple POVs This was an audio ARC from NetGalley. My opinions are my own.  When Aurora “Rory” Evans was a lonely teenager, she ran into a handsome Canadian hockey player while she was selling coffee at the Mall of America. She took his name and pretended to have an actual Canadian boyfriend, making […]

For the dead travel fast

Dracula by Bram Stoker, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator), J.P. Guimont (Narrator)

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The story that Stoker tells, via letters, diary entries, telegrams, and even a few newspaper articles, is about what happens when the undead Count Dracula travels to London and how his activities (mainly bloodsucking and general bad vibes vampire business) interact with the protagonists of the novel. This isn’t my first encounter with the Count; I read a children’s version as a child and then delved into the actual text during high school. Since then, I’ve consumed numerous other adaptations of this tale. My decision […]

The Whispering Dark Has an Interesting Concept, but Poor Execution

The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew

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How many times can a girl refer to herself as glass? How many times can a young man be compared to a blade of some kind? How many SAT words can you use when standard vocabulary would normally suffice? The Whispering Dark has a neat idea behind it – a Deaf girl can hear the dead – but the execution misses the mark, and badly. Delaney Meyers-Petrov (and you know her full name because various characters repeat it over and over throughout the course of […]



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