Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The great fish moved silently through the night water”

Jaws by Peter Benchley

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – there is this village on Long Island, and it’s summer 1974, and there’s this shark and it’s killing people. Which is a problem. It’s a problem because a) dead people and b) this coastal village’s livelihood is based on tourism, namely summer tourism and now the tourists could end up as shark food. So, there is a kind of willful ignorance and pretending everything is fine on behalf of village officials because they need that summer […]

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 […]

Adventures in Babysitting

Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona

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It is October 1993, just after midnight, and six-year-old Ben Mazinski is in the kitchen; there is blood and there is a dead body. So, exactly how did we get here? That is the story that Midnight on Beacon Street sets out to tell. It covers what happened in the lead-up to midnight to Amy (the babysitter) and her two charges, Ben and his older sister, Mira. It doesn’t do this linearly, but rather jumps around in time, revisiting moments from multiple points of view. […]

“You’d think spitting up frogs would be a lot like the worst stomach flu you’ve ever had, but it’s surprisingly different.”

The Carrefour Curse by Dianne. K. Salerni

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There are two tasks in the Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books (and others that are for a picture book, YA book by a trans author, and YA non-fiction) and works intended for readers on the younger than YA end of the spectrum are basically non-existent on my to read list so I had to do some research to find books to read. By and large, libraries can be relied upon to point you in good directions, so I went hunting for […]

When angler fish look cuddly

Five Nights at Freddy’s V01 The Silver Eyes by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley

Five Nights at Freddy’s V02 The Twisted Ones by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley

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I am not a Five Nights at Freddy’s fan. I picked up a graphic novel a few years ago because I was curious about what it was about, but found out later that it was not the “real Freddy” but Goosebump-like stories about things that were spooky. Then recently, I picked up Five Nights at Freddy’s V02 The Twisted Ones in graphic novel form. Of course, I picked up book two and not one, but I thought since I knew I had read something  that […]

What is it about the end of the world?

The Stand by Stephen King

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Almost no event in fiction grabs me more than the collapse of society. Something about how people live when the structures of our society collapse always pulls me in. Seeing the things characters view as important or unimportant after all of the comforts of every day life start to fade away. I do not want civilization to crumble, by any means, but it always makes me wonder about what type of person I would be in that situation. Anyway, that is why I bought a […]



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