Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Childe Roland to the dark tower came

The Dark Tower I: The Gungslinger by Stephen King

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After decades, I’ve decided to make my second pilgrimage to the Tower. The Gunslinger is the first in King’s most ambitious series, where his sprawling, multiversal, interconnected worlds are tied together.  Any Constant Reader worth their salt has made the trip to the Tower at least once. So as I stared down the final few weeks of my marathon training, I decided that I wanted my companion on the long, slow training runs to be Roland. In the world of the Dark Tower, “the man […]

Whisper Sweet Nothings About Chopin All Day Long

The Unforgivable and Other Writings by Cristina Campo

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This collection of short stories was the product of an unusual author.  Campo, born in Italy in 1923, had been a sickly child (heart condition) and grew up secluded by her wealthy family in a villa in Tuscany.  In the 1960s, she moved to Rome, and lived in a convent for long periods of time until her untimely death in 1977. Some of her earlier work borders a little too closely to twee for my taste, and I do not share her enthusiasm for Catholic […]

“If there was one thing she had learned on this trip, it was that leadership was more than titles and giving orders. It was an act of becoming something greater than what one had been before; it was doing things for others, things that they could not do themselves. It was a burden, true, but it refined as much as it hurt.”

White Sand Omnibus by Brandon Sanderson

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hot take very worth re-reading, they should just pull the older version off the shelves — book recall, anyone? wonder if it would have made as much sense if I hadn’t already known what Sanderson was trying to do via the author note So yes, this is markedly, substantially different from the individual books. The art still has the abrupt switcheroo halfway through the second (third?) volume, and the fundamental plot is the same, but there’s a real attempt to clarify the narrative thrust via […]

want more wooing, gosh darn it

Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis

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hot take felt like too much tell don’t show, ended up skipping ahead bc I wanted to see how it ended. I think my biggest issue with this book was that I felt that our male lead–Felix–was much more interesting of a character than Saskia, despite the fact that she’s the titular Witch Queen to be wooed. She felt like an idea of a role (sarcastic, misunderstood, guarded) without enough time for us to see this and believe it, so we skip over by having […]

“I was getting tired of being in an endless succession of things called “the fight of a lifetime.” Just once, I’d like to have the fight of a Tuesday afternoon.”

One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire

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The night-haunts never lie. They could, if they wanted to, but they don’t really see the point. The truth is so much more dangerous than a lie. Life is starting to look up for Toby; she’s dating again, she’s taken on Quentin as her squire, she’s discovered she’s something called a Dochas Sidhe (more on that in a later book), May has moved in, and no one has tried to kill her in a while. Of course, because this is October Daye we’re talking about, […]

Can I Get Some Cooling Fairies?

A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic: Adenashire, Book One by J. Penner

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Who wants to be normal when you can be spectacular? In the heart of Adenashire, a world that is divided into those who have magic and therefore matter, and those who don’t, who matter far less, human baker Arleta Starstone works twice as hard to sell her baked goods, dreaming of stockpiling enough to open the bakery of her dreams. So, when Ervash, her orc neighbor (biggest fan, and with his husband Verdreth, Arleta’s erstwhile father figure) secretly enters her creations into the prestigious Langheim […]



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