Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In the immortal words of Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

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I pulled Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue off the shelf just before leaving on a trip to Paris, partly because I knew Paris featured in at least some of the action and also because I had just finished The Song of Achilles and felt like reading another YA boy-boy romance. But mostly it just seemed like a perfect vacation book, easy and breezy, and at least for that, it did not disappoint. Henry “Monty” Montague is the ne’er-do-well son of an […]

A (not so) funny thing happened on the way to writing this review

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

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I was finally caught up with my reviews at the end of March, and then everything went to hell. I spent a week in Paris (yay!) but came home to what I thought was a simple but nasty case of jetlag + airplane cold but which turned out to be . . . THE FLU. And let me just say that jetlag and three days of crazy-loud home repairs and several days of high fever/chills/aches/lungs-filled-with-pure-evil are not conducive to being productive. Moral of the story: […]

Justice served with a side of pineapple. That’s what I’m here for.

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani

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Sunbolt is one of those books that suck you in and you can’t put down. We meet Hitomi as she is on her way to a secret meeting that she hasn’t been invited to. A fortune teller stops her and begs to tell her fortune (which is of course delightfully vague and thrillingly ominous) telling her to run. Soon, sure enough the armed guards of the evil Blackflame are at her heals and she must run to escape them. Not just because she is foreign, […]

The real monsters aren’t the ones you think

Strange Practice: A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel by Vivian Shaw

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With summer approaching, you might be looking for something fun to take to the beach, and Vivian Shaw’s first novel in what is going to become a Greta Helsing series would be a fine choice. Set in contemporary London, this novel introduces us to Dr. Helsing, daughter of the famous Dr. Wilfert Helsing and doctor to the monster community. Mummies, ghouls, vampires (and vampyres— there’s a difference) all know they can count on Greta and her staff to ably and discreetly guide them back to […]

“I am not good. Nor am I evil. I am no hero. Nor am I villain. I am AIDAN.”

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff

Gemina by Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff

Obsidio by Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff

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I feel like I’ve been reading these books forever and that’s not necessarily a criticism. These are books are seriously big, and I definitely got invested in the story and the main characters (I quickly learned not to get too attached to anyone who wasn’t a beautiful teenager or a creepy computer). But my god, these books are long. The three books take place hundreds of years in the future (I think? There are many references to our life on earth: religion, history, poetry, etc. […]

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age by Sue Armstrong

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I really wanted to like this one more than I did. After all, it’s a book about (as the subtitle says) how and why we age, and as I’ll be fifty at the end of June it’s a topic that doesn’t exactly weigh on my mind, but does make me curious. Run-on sentence, hoy. Armstrong’s book looks at a great many of the physical processes behind aging (the way our cells tick down moment by moment until they die), the ways people have tried to […]



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