Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There was a game he could see and another he couldn’t, and he would play them both.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

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My formative King Arthur works were the 1963 Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I discovered Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, as a preteen, my life as a reader of fantasy and romance was set. I’m a King Arthur enthusiast, but not a purist (except for Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur – great cast, beautiful visuals, terrible movie that should never have been marketed as “historically accurate”). Hearing that a work is a retelling of […]

Fun with Family Secrets

Spy x Family vol 4 by Tatsuya Endo

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So far in Spy X Family, the Forger family consists of dad Loid (real identity: master spy Twilight), mom Yor (real identity master assassin Thorn Princess), and daughter Anya (a telepath). None of them knows the others’ secrets, except for Anya, except that she’s about 6 and thus misunderstands a lot of what she catches her adoptive parents thinking. Loid and Yor marry sort of out of convenience; he needs a family for a mission (she doesn’t know that) and she needs a family to […]

Privacy and free will? Who needs ’em if a drone brings the latest gadget right to my door!

QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling

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A blurb on the back of the book compares this one to a Black Mirror episode, and I find I don’t have much more to say about it. That is very accurate, but it wouldn’t be one of those episodes the internet is on fire about the next day. In the (probably not-too-distant future), corporations have taken over the world, and the US has been renamed QualityLand. People are assigned levels, and the higher your level, the more perks you get (high level people can […]

“Hope, because that is what we must give him, what we must give all of them. Hope and guidance and a place to call their own, a home where they can be who they are without fear of repercussion”

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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It’s rare that I say everyone should read a particular book, but this is a book everyone, of all ages, should read.  TJ Klune has spun a beautiful story in The House in the Cerulean Sea.  It’s about finding one’s place in the world, learning to re-write the narrative others have placed on one’s self, that bigotry and fear can be overcome, and that acceptance can be found, starting sometimes as small as with one person to then slowly grow. Linus Baker is an investigator […]

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

I Would be Doing this Anyway by Jia Tolentino

Rewards by Emma Cline

Crewelwork by Justin Torres

The Tomorrow Box by Curtis Sittenfeld

If You Are Lonely and You Know It by Yiyun Li

The Summer House by Cristina Henriquez

Me and Carlos by Tom Perrotta

Simplexity by Kiley Reid

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Ahh, Lester Bangs. Or at least, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs via Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous. Did I just grab this quote because it features the word “currency”? Well…yes and no. Currency, my latest dive into Amazon Original Stories (but not the latest collection released) describes itself as being about “friends, trends, and dividends”. The link between these eight stories is the currency between people; social, professional, and personal transactions made when money is too much to offer or not enough to cover. The players […]

Ladies do buddy cop stuff in early 20th century steampunk Egypt

A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

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To be clear from the get-go, I hope A Master of Djinn is the first of a series. It’s got an interesting world, a twist of the classic steampunk which takes the perspective of the Egyptians not the English with a strong reliance of the local folklore/mythology (as opposed to the European traditions), it’s got some interesting characters, like Agent Fatma a queer lady Agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, Siti her capricious lover, and Agent Hadia rookie partner. Some of […]



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