Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Autobiography of a Narcissistic Psychopath

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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Coriolanus Snow’s only way to rebuild his family’s legacy is to have his tribute make a good showing in the 10th Hunger Games. But when he starts to become interested in Lucy Gray, he wonders if it might be possible for her to actually win them. I put off reading this book for a long time, scared off by mixed reviews from other fans of the Hunger Games series. It’s certainly a different type of story, but I ended up appreciating this new perspective into […]

Maladaptive Daydreaming

Bunny by Mona Awad

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No matter how Samantha loathes the cliche of girls who make up the rest of her writing group, with their overwrought work and their insistence on referring to each other as ‘Bunny,’ she can’t help but get sucked into their strange world when they invite her to join them. This is a dark and satirical read which pokes plenty of fun at the pretentious streak that can run deep in the people who attend MFA programs – considering the author was one of them, the […]

“He really does have very nice biscuits.”

Finlay Donovan Knockes 'Em Dead (Finlay Donovan, #2) by Elle Cosimano

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I love this series. I’m so happy there will be at least two more books full of wacky hijinks, dead body disposal, panicking over money, BFF frandship moments between Finlay and Vero, meta commentary, and I’m sure stuff I can’t even predict because this series is chaos. Beautiful chaos. Finlay Donovan, romantic suspense and crime author, keeps getting herself into these situations involving real life crime. It’s been several months since the first book, and it seems this time around, someone has taken a hit […]

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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I did not expect to love this book so much, but it really hit me pretty hard. I liked Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut just fine, it was fun, and I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but I didn’t connect to it emotionally like I did God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Near the beginning of the book, there’s a moment when Eliot Rosewater is thinking about Vonnegut’s stand-in writer character, Kilgore Trout, who is Eliot’s favorite author (see quote below, which also applies to sci-fi and fantasy […]

the only Scream sequel I need

The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones

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Take the meta-horror-commentary of Scream and dial it up to eleven; there at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in moonlight and brandishing a rusty machete, you will find The Last Final Girl. Stephen Graham Jones is leaning hard into the tropes of teen slasher movies, and if you aren’t in on the joke it will fly over your freshly-severed-by-garage-door-head. The story is presented almost as a film treatment; close ups, pans, POVS, and audience responses are all written in and used with cheeky abandon. […]

Delightful stubbornness

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove is about a delightfully stubborn widower in Sweden. He has a strict logic that he applies to the world. He yearns for consistency and routine. Anyone who deviates from the order is likely inefficient and an idiot in his mind. He is suspicious of most things and prefers to abstain from all social things. I enjoyed his rising frustration at the computer store when he attempts to buy a computer. Despite his crankiness, Ove fell in love with a woman named […]



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