Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The girl who won’t quit

Asadora! V06 by Naoki Urasawa

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CBR15Passport country (Japan)   Manga and I have an interesting relationship. I appreciate it, and it does its own thing. But occasionally that thing has me going along for the ride.  And the series by Naoki Urasawa, Asadora! has me riding (so far) all six volumes. (This volume is translated by John Werry) While slower than the others, this is a good build-up for volume 7 (planned for October 2023). And while these “in-between novels” are a nice way to give you more information about […]

Both influential and overlooked

Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis by Tom Humberstone

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CBR15Passport Own While I was on a short vacation, I finished a fictional novel of a little-known black dancer of the 1840s, William Henry Lane, or Master Juba. And I guess I was in the mood for stories of real, but not necessarily extremely famous people, because then I started Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis. Which is a memoir of Suzanne Lenglen, a French female tennis player. She was known, at the time worldwide, but she was not necessarily known for her tennis […]

They lobster the kelpcakes

Officer Clawsome V01 Kelpcake Crisis!   by Brain Smitty Smith

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CBR15Passport  already own  As the description says of this Brain Smitty Smith graphic novel, Officer Clawsome: Kelpcake Crisis!  this is Dogman meets Spongebob. And if you like them, you will like this. There is a bit of “James Bond-like” elements with a few villains (there is a mechanical shark that has one heck of a bad diet…I mean eating garbage is one thing, but whole buildings?), but overall, everything is straight forward and not overly “sophisticated.” Then again, a talking lobster who is a former […]

Pinball’s lineage

Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball by Jon Chad

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  CBR15Passport Genre  The history of pinball and video games is just the start of Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball by Jon Chad. We get a little history of the country, and we get to see how things have not really changed on one hand (pinball/video games will corrupt our children! Lead them to a life of crime! It is just luck no skill!) and how they have changed (from the tabletop games to our known look for pinball machines, from France […]

The Wolves of Sports Television

Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller, Tom Shales

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The thing I appreciated about this book the most was how it came into my possession. Several years ago (pre-COVID), I went to an estate sale in my parents’ neighborhood. From what I could tell, the person for whom the estate sale was held was a retired military guy, very into sports and “dad” books, with great taste in music. He had lots of interesting books and music CDs, and I bought this book, an old Yardbirds live recording, and a random tool. Sometimes estate […]

Batman the B!tch and other Running Stories and Rules

Born to Run 2: The Ultimate Training Guide by Christopher McDugall, Eric Orton

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I got Born to Run 2 on sale on a whim and I’m glad I didn’t pay full price. This book gets judgey and inflexible; it does have some good looking recommendations for individual activities for training, and recipes for long run pre/post/mid run nutrition. The book is a running guide book and it’s set up to follow a core group of people who run and their journeys to find a way to do so that works (naturally it’s the trainers who wrote/inspired the book’s). […]



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