Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The master at some of his best work (Belated Bingo – White Whale)

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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I’m a big fan of Stephen King. I’ve read many of the classics (Pet Sematary, The Shining, It, Misery, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter,  Needful Things) some of the zany ones (Christine and Rose Madder)  and I think my favorite, the most not-put-down-able for me, was The Stand. All that said I find him pretty uneven and sort of have to steel myself for his typical writing style. For folks that haven’t read any of his books, the way I describe it is that it is always […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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A knock at the door. A series of frantic knocks at the door. Yes, It Will Just Be Us  nearly starts with “it was a dark and stormy night”. Our narrator, Sam, is a down-and-out adjunct professor of archeology barely hanging onto her sanity. After a series of upsetting events, we find her moving back to her crumbling, ancestral mansion in on the edge of a foreboding Virginia swamp. The mansion is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. It’s haunted by the living specter of her […]

Two stories that couldn’t be more different

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

We Are All Monsters Here by Kelley Armstrong

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Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein (4 stars) What, exactly, is money? How does it work? Why does it work? How did it develop? What I’ve always assumed, and what I think most people who think about it assume, is that money evolved from early barter economies. Instead of selling, for instance, crops for money, early farmers would exchange crops for things that they needed. So a farmer would have to find, say, a potter and exchange a bushel of […]

Get my rocker, Gert….I’m officially old

Warm Blood by Josh Tierney

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Looking for a new graphic novel? Skip Warm Blood by Josh Tierney. What I thought was going to be a murder mystery with a main character that was less Nancy Drew and more an everyday girl trying to make it through high school algebra turned into an odd collection of stories connected by a girl called Penny. Every single page has some bizarre events. Even if it is just a normal thing like trying on clothes at the mall. But the most bizarre event? The […]

Sexy magic boots

Kicking It by Faith Hunter and Kalayna Price

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When the ‘rona hit, I found it hard to concentrate on a book. If you’re in a slump, I highly recommend trying an anthology from your favorite genre. Kicking It was edited by Faith Hunter and Kalayna Price. I haven’t read any Jane Yellowrock books, but her story made me order the first book. I stumbled across the anthology more so for Price who wrote the Alex Craft books, which was my be favorite series from last year. I took a lot of breaks between […]

Dracula sucks…but the book doesn’t!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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Dracula sucks but the book doesn’t. I go through phases of reading classics or otherwise tackling books with reputations of being difficult. Sometimes it’s easy to see why books are classics – they’re timeless and engrossing. A Tale of Two Cities is that way for me. So is Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Other times the classics feel like archaeological work. The reader is excavating and extrapolating. Dracula felt like work to me, but the reader can definitely appreciate the book’s influence on future work. In particular, […]



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