Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Difficult Women, Trauma, and Romance (Bingos #4 & 5)

The Trouble with Hating You by Sajni Patel

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The Trouble with Hating You is not your typical Romance read, even though Patel is working within and against established tropes, and I liked it better for it. This is definitely an enemies to lovers romance (the title pretty much announces it) and in it we have Liya Thakkar,  a happily single successful biochemical engineer, who has a very strained relationship with her parents and has been very clear that she is not interested in being set up with a potential spouse. The moment she […]

Hogwarts, but even MORE racist!

The Black Mage by Daniel Barnes, D.J. Kirkland

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I was intrigued when I saw this book come up on NetGalley, so I picked it up, but then forgot to read it, and then I was sad.  And I met the author and illustrator at the New York Comic Con, and they were really nice!  And then the library I work at got a copy, so I was the first one to check it out! Anyway…   On first glance, this looks like Harry Potter, but if Harry Potter was the only black kid.  […]

When the Internet called, this author answered!

Mrs. Perivale and the Blue Fire Crystal by Dash Hoffman

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Is this a great masterpiece of a novel?  No.  Is it the next great fantasy epic?  Also no.  Should you read it?  Yeah!  If not for the story itself, at least to support the way it came to be.  I’m going to put exactly what the text says:   @broodingYAhero said, “It’s amazing how many prophecies involve teens. You’d think they’d pick more emotionally stable people, with more free time. Like grandmas.” To which @Dinuriel replied, “…I would read the hell out of a series […]

I finally understand the struggle of non-English speakers who have to wait for books to be translated

Ghostsitter - A Crazy Inheritance by Tommy Krapweiss

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Okay, so this series is originally written in German. The first one was translated into English in an Audible Original (but not the other 7) and they made no attempt to Americanize it!  Hooray!  (They also never explicitly say they’re in Germany, which may have helped clear up some confusion in the beginning.)   Fourteen-year-old Tom is living his normal life with his adopted grandma when one day they get a notice that his great-uncle Heinrich has died, and Tom needs to attend the will […]

A delightfully modern 19th century novel

Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

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CBR12 BINGO: Green BINGO (diagonal): Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Violet Note: I read the version translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, published in 2020.  When you open a book and find that it is dedicated to “the first worm to gnaw the cold flesh of my corpse,” you know it isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill novel. I might not find that so unusual (I do enjoy my share of darkly humorous authors), though, if this novel hadn’t been originally published in 1881. […]

cbr12bingo – white whale (and BLACKOUT!!!! now I if only I could blackout and forget that this book exists!)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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Lolita is absolutely vile, and I cannot be convinced otherwise. Yes, Humbert Humbert is the worst, and yes, we are supposed to know that he is a monster, but good lord this book is venerated from here to kingdom come as if it is the be all-end all of twentieth century literature. The edition that I picked up, which was published in 1997 as a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the original pressing- and is still the one in current re-prints and mass circulation, STILL […]



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