Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Happy Horror Days

Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology by Ellen Datlow (Editor), Christopher Golden, Benjamin Percy, Alma Katsu, Terry Dowling, Nick Mamatas, Glen Hirshberg, Garth Nix, Tananarive Due, Richard Kadrey, Stephen Graham Jones, Nadia Bulkin, Josh Malerman, Cassandra Khaw, Kaaron Warren

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I am a big fan of horror all year round, so I am going to be that person right now and be all “Ghost stories at Christmas are Victorian tradition!”  And they were, and I like to embrace this particular tradition.  There are 17 creepy seasonal horror stories in this book, so next year if I am on the ball I might even be able to set up a spooky reading advent-ish adventure for myself. This collection is not just about Christmas, other winter holidays […]

You’ll never look at mushrooms the same way…

The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy

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I broke one of my personal reading rules with this book – always read a series in order. The Unfamiliar Garden is book two in The Comet Cycle…which, in my defense, I didn’t realize when I started reading it. But luckily for me, the stories in the Comet Cycle seem to be more interrelated than sequential. In this world, there was a comet. It came close enough to Earth to be amazing, but not close enough to hit. A year goes by, and the Earth’s […]

Out of Print, but should not be forgotten

Refresh, Refresh by Danica Novgorodoff

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Refresh, Refresh has come up on my radar several times. I was not interested as it looked like either a bloody fantasy with no point or another war book. A graphic novel would be an interesting take on either theme, but was I in the mood for it? In a recent grabbing of graphic novel covers catching my eye, I said, “Worse case I do not like and do not finish.” I had a feeling (though not sure why) it was about Vietnam. And it is […]

Werewolves live among us

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

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Ugh.  OK.  This one was a little rough.  It was such a good concept, but it was sooooo slow.  I think the audiobook was about 20-21 hours.  It probably could’ve been 10 and it would’ve been better. The premise is that some people in the world are werewolves.  They were “infected” with a prion originated in wolves.  I nerdily enjoyed the backstory of the disease.  I could’ve listened to more about that! It starts out strong too.  Patrick Gamble is on a plane flying to […]

Ugh, this could have been so.much.better.

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Oh, this book had such a cool set up, but just couldn’t seem to live up to it! Set about 150 years in the future, The Dead Lands focuses on a society built among the ruins of St. Louis. This community, known as the Sanctuary, is all that remains of the United States after a super flu, and then nuclear war, wipes everyone out. Or so they’ve been led to believe. Then one day, a slightly-mutant girl (Gawea, as in Saca-) shows up at the Sanctuary, […]

So much wasted potential.

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I know we’re experiencing a kind of glut in dystopian fiction these days, but I do honestly enjoy the genre when it’s done well (my go-to examples are still always going to be Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I am teaching this fall and SUPER excited about). I look for other examples by authors I haven’t read, and The Dead Lands was one such text. I’ve never read anything by Benjamin Percy, but one of my Facebook friends […]



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