Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Neverending Battles Get Old

Black Clover vols. 28-31 by Yuki Tabata

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I hadn’t realized how long I’d kind of ignored the Black Clover manga series until I was in the library and saw that I was at least 4 volumes behind; this seems to happen with shonen fighting-based series an awful lot – the pattern of lots of fights with sudden power-ups that feel preprogrammed because the user automatically knows what and how to use the newly developed ability. I’ve gotten behind/bored with quite a few series where this happens; at least Yugi-Oh! had the sense […]

It’s the biggest and most dangerous dating show in the universe!

Sweep of the Heart by Ilona Andrews

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This is not the place to start The Innkeeper Chronicles, as it’s the sixth installment overall (four full books and a novella come before it). This story has a LOT of callbacks to previous stories, so just start with Clean Sweep if you haven’t tried this yet. Innkeepers Dina DeMille and Sean Evans are still trying to recover from the last cosmic adventure that taxed them when they discover that Wilmos, the aging werewolf who’s pretty much Sean’s surrogate grandfather has been abducted. The traces […]

Why I can’t finish action manga series most of the time

Jujutsu Kaisen vols 13-15 by Gege Akutami

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Something that annoys me is when action-based stories spend many pages, episodes, or volumes telling a bunch of different sides, parts, or experiences of a fight; it gets boring and I lose track, get bored, or both. Jujustsu Kaisen has gone there. It started a volume or two ago, and volumes 13, 14, and 15 continue the fighting for the same fight. Volume 15 at least contains a hint maybe actual plot or character might be impending. Really the only thing that makes these sequences […]

Good side fight and breaking the fourth wall

Fire Force vol 26 by Atsushi Ohkubo

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It’s pretty rare for a manga volume to focus on a side character and be this good; I actually didn’t miss Company 8, Shinra, etc. all that much. Then again, the backstory and fight focus on Benimaru is interesting enough but also kind of predictable way to get to know a little more about one of my favorite characters in the series. There’s actually just a little character growth shown, although again, not much of it all that surprising. The one thing I’d like to […]

More Than a Female James Bond

The Night of Morningstar by Peter O'Donnell

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This is a recreational reread for me. I love the pulp novels of Peter O’Donnell and his exciting secret agent, Modesty Blaise, and reread the 13 novels every couple years. Modesty, in this novel, works with her equally competent partner, Willie Garvin, to combat a worldwide organization attempting to take over the world. In the other books, her beginnings as the head of a European crime syndicate is mentioned, but in this story, we watch her early retirement as she and Willie have decided crime […]

I Should Reread These Modesty Blaise Books in Order

A Taste for Death by Peter O'Donnell

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I enjoy rereading all the Modesty Blaise novels, but two of the characters who fall in love in this book were an old married couple in the last one. While the exploits of Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin, are exciting, this has one of the best fight scenes in all the Modesty novels. In fact, she has a scary encounter with a swordsman AND Willie meets up with a gorilla-like sadist who had battered him almost to the death during a previous encounter. Stuck […]



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