Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“A small creature swallowed whole by a monster…”

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

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“Horror,” Laura Miller says in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, “turns on the dissolution of boundaries […] between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside.” Maybe the way horror lurks in liminal spaces, only rarely coming right out in the open, has something to do with how much I enjoy the genre. And The Haunting of Hill House serves masterfully as our guide to those cracked and uncertain places.  

“Whoever said running in the morning gives you energy never had a day job that involves customer service.”

You by Caroline Kepnes

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You was a bizarre reading experience for me. I had heard of the show on Netflix, and was sort of aware that it was based on a book. I think I knew that it was about a sociopathic stalker, but honestly, didn’t care to know any more than that. I didn’t think it was for me. And then. Well, I have this friend. She’s extraordinarily talented and has been getting some amazing jobs as a director recently. She’s been doing episodes of Queen Sugar, The […]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This was an interesting story that I appreciated far more than I enjoyed. Candace Chen is a 20-something in middle-management at a Manhattan publishing company, in the specialty Bible division. She is good at her job, but she doesn’t really like much about it. It’s a job, it pays the bills. But she has no passion for it. But Candace, like many of her generation, doesn’t really know what it is that she actually does have passion for. She used to like photography, and had […]

How can one drowning rat save another?

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

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I really try to write reviews shortly after I read the book. If I don’t, books often tend to quickly fall to the bottom of my memory well. I can tell you whether I liked a book or not, but that’s about it. I may have waited too long on this one, but here goes. Psychotherapist, Theo Faber, is just starting a new job at an institution for the criminally insane. From the beginning of the novel, he is a little fanboy about a particular […]

Thanks, Book Club!

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

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So I’m giving this another go due to book club and the series coming out (which looks awesome!)  But there is a reason I didn’t read it until now. I bought the book a while ago (10 years ago?) and it was just hanging out in my TBR pile.  Then I started dating a guy, and he recommended that I read it. So dug it out and put it on top of the pile. Then we broke up. And I couldn’t seem to get past […]

Improbable + gloomy = Not interested

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs

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This is going to seem like an odd way to start this review, but stay with me a minute while I describe a scene from one of my favorite old movies, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Mr. Blandings (Cary Grant) purchases a wreck of a house in Connecticut. When he brings an engineer out to look at the property, the engineer tells him to tear the house down. “Tear it down!” an incredulous Blandings shouts. “If your sills were shot and your timbers was okay, […]



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