Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Midnight Library: Surprisingly uplifting

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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The Midnight Library follows a woman name Nora Seed who has a pretty sad life: dead end job, bad apartment, dead cat, no friends, dead mom. So she decides to take her own life by overdosing. After laying down to die, she finds herself in this kind of interstitial space of a weirdly magical library with infinite books of all the infinite lives she could have lived. The librarian is a woman from her past, Mrs. Elm, who helped her through her father’s death. Mrs. […]

take a look! it’s in *this* book!

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

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Why not take a break from the world with a strangely soothing tale of a library fire? That question appears to be pure chaos, but seriously: wouldn’t it be nice to let a meticulous journalist and storyteller narrate a well-researched account of history, memory, and true crime? Good news: you can do it! Just plug your headphones in and let Susan Orlean and The Library Book transport you to a different world. Orleans covers more than just the true-crime glitter that is strewn around the  […]

Almost 400 words for a book that might not have a 3rd of that!

The Book No One Wants to Read by Beth Bacon

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One of the biggest challenges I have about writing reviews is writing a 250-word review for a book that might not even have 125 words! The Book No One Wants to Read is one of those books. There is hardly any text and what is there is physically large on the page. The only reason it might even come close to 125 words is because there are two pages with just one (well actually two words, but you need to read why that is) repeated […]

“Books are Doors and I wanted out”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix B. Harrow

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#CBR12 Bingo: Debut Official book description: In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artefacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.   Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world […]

The Greatest Library that Never Was

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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I was a huge fan of the Night Circus, so I was ecstatic when the lovely faintingviolet shared her copy of the Starless Sea with me. To give too much of the plot away takes all the joy out of reading this story, but the baseline is that there’s a magical library hidden underground accessible by doorways above. The nature through which patrons find these doors varies to fate, and in recent years, someone’s been closing all the doors. At least until a grad student named Zachery stumbles […]

Somehow this all seems familiar

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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I don’t remember how I heard about The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, but I saw it on a library shelf not long after I heard about it, so of course I had to check it out (pun intended). The story concentrates on two brothers, Rob the older from whose perspective the story comes, and Charley the younger, genius of the sort who finished a PhD and publishes an academic book on Dickens at the age of nineteen. There is the usual kind of brotherly […]



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