Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How to Vampire Properly

Deadly Assessments by Drew Hayes

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The Fred the Vampire Accountant series was practically my introduction to Drew Hayes, one of my current favorites. It’s also one of the very few series in which I actually enjoy first-person narration. Deadly Assessments is installment number five, and while many things remain the same, there are some distinct differences. The novel is still structured as a series of closely related short stories, and short stories are not my favorite genre, but these I like. In this case, the adventures pick up right where […]

Just Short of Amazing

Pump Six & Other Stories by Paolo Bagigalupi

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How have I not heard of Paolo Bagigalupi until right now? A colleague of mine recommended “Pop Squad,” and it was life changing. I had to go out and find the whole collection. Bagigalupi’s writing is an amazing mix of darkly twisted but heartfelt prose. His short story collection, Pump Six & Other Stories, covers eleven forays into his speculative imagination. My favorites were “The Fluted Girl,” “Pop Squad,” and “Pump Six,” but all the stories in the collection share a new look on post […]

My original title for this review was “Getting Blingy With It” and I feel like I deserve an award for that or possibly a slap in the face

Cleaning the Gold by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child

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GBI Agent Will Trent is working on a cold case: the murder of a sherrif’s deputy in a small Georgia town, twenty-odd years earlier. His most recent lead sends him undercover at Fort Knox, where his alias Jack Phineas Wolfe (no, really), army dropout, is hired to clean the gold. No, that’s what he’s hired to do. For real. Polish gold bars. This is not a euphemism; he’s inside a room with his suspect, polishing bars and getting sweaty. The suspect, by the way, is […]

It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.

Utopia by Thomas More

Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Heloise and Abelard by Peter Abelard and Heloise

Fairy Tales by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm

Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault

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Utopia – 3/5 Stars Have you read Utopia? I hadn’t before this. I decided to read it because it’s one of those books that has always been in the periphery of my life and life’s reading because of how much I’ve read dystopian literature. But I avoided it. It reads a lot like Plato’s Republic and makes references to it, and it’s presented like a would be travelogue. Sort of like later books like Thoma Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia or Jan Morris’s […]

What a pity that I am not an honest man!

Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Thief by Maurice Le Blanc

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I love how inspiring and petty Sherlock Holmes makes fictional detectives. Whether he’s foiling mysteries, showing up and helping Scooby Doo solve crimes, foiling police work, setting impossible standards, what have you! In this book from 1907, French writer Maurice Le Blanc invents someone somewhere in between a detective and a criminal. Mostly he’s there to propose mysteries impossible for others to figure out and to solve puzzles others have failed to solve.  In the first couple stories from this collection, he’s mostly being a […]

Inspiring a case of the midnight giggles

Calypso by David Sedaris

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This isn’t so much a review, as a love letter to the mind of David Sedaris. You’ll just have to bear with me here… I first heard David Sedaris on the This American Life podcast. His storytelling was always peppered with humour, wry, and occasionally intensely personal. But what captured me most was his voice. It was so mild… verging on prim at times. Which makes his storytelling all the more engaging, as his voice rarely matches his topics. David Sedaris’ delightfully dark and twisted […]



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