Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Not a bad introduction to what magic could be in your life

Kitchen Table Magic by Melissa Cynova

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Written as an introduction to witchcraft and magic, Cynova breaks her book Kitchen Table Magic into two parts: the first is an overview of what magic is and the various parts of what witchcraft are. She gives an overview of intention, grounding, spells, divination, etc. The second half is a collection of spells and rituals for various situations. Cynova presents herself as a hard polytheist with a belief in the supernatural. PROS: While Cynova herself is a supernatural-believer she has moments where she recognizes that a lot […]

When the End Comes

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura

Cell by Stephen King

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I recently read two books with apocalyptic overtones. Neither were great but both were eminently readable, if weird and unfocused… Cult X * Well then. It’s almost impossible for a book as popular as Fuminori Nakamura’s Cult X to get anything less than a 3+ star rating on GoodReads. A book usually has enough vociferous defenders who give it gratuitous 5s to put it over the top. That this one was hovering at 2.97 when I picked it up was not a good sign for […]

I know I am, but what are you?

The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

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Or the full name: The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too). Yeesh. We all love taking personality quizzes, don’t we? Which Hogwarts house we’d belong to (I’m a Ravenpuff), which is our True Colour (Green/Blue tie), which Friends character we’d be (…Mondler). Or, perhaps slightly more scientifically, our Myers-Briggs profile, or Big Five ratings. When I was in high school, there was one proto-BuzzFeed-type website where you could do all sorts […]

Particles

Underworld by Don DeLillo

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Underworld exemplifies everything I love and loathe about Don DeLillo. Brilliance, frustration, depth, redundancy. All in 827 mostly readable pages. A book has to be damn good for a reader to put up with it for so long and large stretches of this book are. DeLillo is such a sensory writer; he pens time and memory through sight, smell and touch in such a way as to occasionally leave me breathless. There are passages of this book that will really stick with me. The central conceit […]

Snorky

The Confessions of Al Capone by Loren Estleman

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This one is a tough book to pull off. There’s already tons of bs associated with the legend of Al Capone that it’s tough to discern the truth. Fortunately, Loren Estleman, a writer who I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time, gets it well. Estleman’s research is incredible. I read Max Alan Collins’ Scarface and the Untouchable before this so a lot of it was fresh in my head. I figured he (Estleman) might fudge the facts in order to tell a more compelling […]

Pandemic Through My Generation

Severance by Ling Ma

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I tried to read this gem the first few weeks after the pandemic broke out in New York. Couldn’t do it. As it is significantly better than the other pandemic reads (Killing Williamsburg and Zone One), the fact that it dealt with a terrifying virus from China was hitting too close to home. It took months to work up the gumption to return to it. And I’m glad I did, because it is really good. Yes, the focus of it is a pandemic ruining the world. Shen […]



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