Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Five stars with some qualifications for this White Whale book.

It by Stephen King

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Well, I did it. I did It. (I’m sure this is adding so much to the ongoing pun-based conversation surrounding this book.) I started this book on January 22nd, and finished it on January 30th. That is a long time to read a book for me, especially at the beginning of the year, when I like to get my momentum up and running with shorter, exciting books. But I’m doing the whole TBR Jar thing this year, and I pulled It out almost immediately. When […]

NOS4A2

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

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What a journey I had with this novel. I am, at least in name, a member of a horror book club that one of my pals put together. This was the selection, so, like a dutiful book club member I picked it up. The waitlist was forever long for the novel but eventually, the audio was available and I dug in. I was positively delighted to discover that the narrator was Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager and Red from Orange is […]

Best Story about Lovers EVER!

Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell

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I hadn’t heard of Russell until I saw this Penguin edition somewhere. I love castles with ghosts in them, or at least I love reading about them and visiting them in the daylight. Not sure, if I would like to spend a night in one. So of course, I had to get it and eventually read it. The fact that Russell worked for Playboy does show in a few of the stories – one or two stories have a link with sex and violence. The […]

Things that go ‘bump’ in the dark

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger

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When I was a kid, my family and I went camping in the bush. On one particular hike, there was a tunnel called ‘The Wombat Hole’ that was notorious with the camping crowd. It was a gradually narrowing natural cave formation that you could walk into, but had to crawl out of on your belly. I’ve no doubt this natural wonder has long been shut, but the early 90s were a wild, unregulated time in Australian National Parks. So my Dad, tempted by the challenge […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Agony and Relief: Birth Order as Curse

Secondborn by Amy A. Bartol

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“It’s no good hating them. They can’t feel it, and it will only make you bitter.” — p. unknown  



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