Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Books about books are the best kinds of books

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

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CBR 17 BINGO: Favorite (revisiting this old favorite for Bingo) BINGO: Favorite, Red, Family, Border, Green Visiting local bookshops is standard practice whenever my husband and I go on vacation. Recently in Vancouver, we wandered into a store called MacLeod’s Books, which is one of those places where you can easily get lost among the piles. Books are roughly organized into genres, but each section is overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of volumes spilling over from the shelves. This is the type of place where […]

How the legend might have started with books before lattes

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

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What’s cozy in the same way as a latte? Second-hand books. That’s what we get with Bookshops & Bonedust, and I’m down with that. This is a pretty good prequel, but it can be done as a stand-alone, and it also does a nice job of maybe setting up volume 3. The whole story starts with young and eager Viv getting ahead of herself and getting injured in a fight. The rest of her team leaves her behind to recover in middle of nowhere Murk, […]

One pill makes you larger / And one pill makes you small / And the ones that mother gives you / Don’t do anything at all

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

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Okay, the title of this book is just a hint of what the book is going to cover.  And the title of the book is a lot, which make sense because this book is often a lot. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson covers exactly what the title suggests. As a general note and content warning, this book contains extensive discussions of drug addiction and self-harm. One section, in particular, was especially disturbing, prompting […]

If books could kill. (I do not regret this pun.)

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

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Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a contemporary fantasy novel that treads some well-worn tropes and plot structures that make it rather predictable, but because of the execution, still very enjoyable. If you haven’t spent your life reading fantasy books, you probably won’t think this was as predictable as I did, so in that way it might be a good intro to fantasy book, particularly since it’s set in our world. But there really is enough here to interest regular fantasy readers as well (unless you’re […]

“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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Look, I’m just gonna do the thing. Here is (part of) the blurb: On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the […]

Appreciating a book vs. liking it

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

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This is totally not my usual type of book, but a reader acquaintance is a big fan of the author, and I do like books about books, so I decided to give this one a try. It’s mostly lovely. The writing is so good – I can see why my acquaintance is a fan. Margaret is a self-sufficient introvert who works at the bookshop her father owns. She’s an amateur biographer, doing research for fun and occasionally writing an article or book about a person […]



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