Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Around the World Around the World

Night Prayers by Santiago Gamboa

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Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating. Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and […]

Yeah, I’d read it again

Continental Drifter by Kathy MacLeod

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Honestly, there are not many surprises in Continental Drifter by Kathy MacLeod. Granted, there might be a few “oh didn’t expect that to go exactly that way,” but for the most part, you know where our narrator is going and how things will probably turn out. Yet, it is an enjoyable read for the adult reader and the pre-teen/early teen will experience it new. We follow Kathy’s (based on the author’s own experiences) story as family, friendship and belonging all come together. This makes a […]

Mindfreak Mystery

Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett

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First things first: all my caveats about this series from my review of Bangkok Tattoo still apply (book is written as the perspective of an easterner by a westerner). Everything in this series needs to be taken with that grain of salt. Still…wow. This book messed with my mind. In each of these tales, Burdett reaches for a complex plot, weaving in Buddhist theology and observations about life in Thailand and the eastern Pacific rim in general. Here, you could see a writer who is completely comfortable […]

An Alluring Series

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Will Leitch is one of my favorite writers. He covers sports in word form and movies on the Grierson & Leitch podcast. All year long, he has grappled with is love for the Wes Anderson movie Isle of Dogs, which is set in Japan and has many references to famed director Akira Kurosawa but whose characters are voiced mostly by white people. The movie has been deemed (accurately in my estimation) to be culturally appropriated. I’m not one for winning “Who’s the most woke white person?” contests. […]

Tattooed corpses and Muslim fundamentalists prove a heady mix in Thailand

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Bangkok detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Royal Thai Police returns in another dramatic, action-packed, and nearly hallucinogenic plot involving tattoo artists, mutilated corpses, golden-hearted whores, hard-bitten police captains, Muslim fundamentalists, and the CIA—all of this against the backdrop of an impoverished nation dependent on drugs and the sex trade for survival and a Buddha-worshipping cop who doesn’t hesitate to bend the rules when necessity and/or his conscience dictates.   A strangely brilliant and obsessive CIA operative named Mitch Turner is found murdered in the bed […]



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