Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.”

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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Despite very recently giving five stars to the latest Grady Hendrix weirdo horror book (review HERE), I was surprised by how much I liked this. As I’ve been exploring the horror genre over the past year, I’ve learned that my tastes usually run towards the lighter end of the horror spectrum, and that I don’t do well with gore and violence just for gore and violence’s sake*. I need that sort of thing to have a purpose, and I need it to not make me […]

Natalie Naudus saved me on this one.

Heart of the Sun Warrior (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #2) by Sue Lynn Tan

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Last year I got into a really bad habit of not only buying pretty much every first book in a series that looked good to me, but oftentimes buying the sequel as well. That is what I did for this series. I was so convinced I would love it, I overcommitted. When I finally got around to reading the first book, Daughter of the Moon Goddess, in January, I had a tough time getting through it. Something about the pacing and the writing style did […]

“You really named her ‘Linnea’?” “Linnea’s a survivor.” “She dies in every movie.” “Her characters do, but she goes from movie to movie,” Letha says. “She never dies.”

Don't Fear the Reaper (The Lake Witch Trilogy, #2) by Stephen Graham Jones

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So this was a really good book! But it had extremely large shoes to fill. My expectations weren’t that high for it, but only because I purposefully set them low knowing that living up to the genius that was My Heart is a Chainsaw was just going to be a really tall order. I feel like I need to re-read both this one and the first one pretty soon and take it slowly, and tab and annotate, because I got in my own way here. […]

“And they all liv’d together in a little crooked house.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

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Ooh, I got really into this one. It’s been a month since I’ve finished so I’ve had some time to think (though I do of course wish I’d written the review right away, but alas) and I think the reason that I loved this one so much is that it’s one of the few non-detective mystery novels to get the mystery part right and have it be believable. A lot of the time, as a mystery fan when encountering books with non-detective main characters, there […]

A really good fantasy debut, with one glaring flaw.

The Justice of Kings (Empire of the Wolf, #1) by Richard Swan

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This was promising! I’ve had my eye on it since it was published, and an audio sale at Libro.fm finally gave me the incentive to pick it up. I was originally reading The Pariah by Anthony Ryan at this spot in my February TBR, but listening to that book was a better sleep aid than it was a story*, and after only a couple of hours of attempting to listen, I swapped it out for this one, and that was a great decision. I particularly […]

A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

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This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]



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