Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This Discworld book has been recommended for D&D players so I finally checked it out.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

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Nearly twenty years ago I gave Pratchett’s Discworld books a chance.  I had a long commute and been gifted audiobooks of the first few books in the series.  I listened to about the first three books and then decided they weren’t for me.  They felt gimmicky with a focus on clever ways of saying modern things without using current words.  For some reason, calling popcorn ‘banged grains’ sticks out in my memory as an example.  But over the years I kept seeing the devotion readers […]

Dystopian Utopia

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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Imagine a future where war, poverty, crime, illness, disease and death have been conquered. Sounds like paradise, right? But the thing is, without death, the world becomes overpopulated and all the problems return. In Scythe, the first book in a trilogy, Neal Shusterman imagines this world where all knowledge and information is overseen by a god-like universal information storage system called the Thunderhead and where the world population is “managed” by individuals called scythes. Scythes are feared and revered and are an authority unto themselves. […]

I feel like a Jerk, but I didn’t like it

The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

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Steve Martin is a talented guy. He’s had a successful stand-up comedy and acting career since the 1970s; he’s written/co-written funny screenplays like The Jerk, Three Amigos, and L.A. Story; he’s published novels and written a Broadway musical; he’s an avid art collector and he plays a mean banjo; he’s won five Grammys, an Emmy, and a host of other awards. Throw in that stint performing magic on Main Street in Disneyland and you can say he’s lived a highly successful life. So, I feel kind […]

Life: it’s not nothing

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: A Novel by Shehan Karunatilaka

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, the action takes place amidst the violence of Tamils versus Sinhalese versus Indians, not to mention a variety of outside groups and organizations connected to them. The main character is a photographer and gambler, the gay son of Burgher/Tamil mother and Sinhalese father. Maali Almeida says he is not on any side partaking in the violence in Sri Lanka, that his goal is to take the […]

Foiling spies and spying foils

The Ministry of Unladylike Activity (2022) by Robin Stevens

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CBR Bingo ‘Font’ square–the title on the cover embeds a cool little plane, a magnifying glass, and a fluttering blackout curtain in its lettering, while the print text inside is interspersed with lists and notes that look like handwriting. Robin Stevens’s ‘Murder Most Unladylike’ series (2014-2021) is rather marvellous; it starts off in a very English boarding school in the early 1930s, where the very English Honourable Daisy Wells befriends Hazel Wong, a new girl from Hong Kong who is trying to find her place […]

Up to date on all my review and managed a bingo blackout *does little dance*

The Stand-Up Groomsman by Jackie Lau

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CBR14 Bingo: Funky (Mel makes Vivian feel very funky, in the bad way, when criticising her career choices when they first meet. There is later a lot of *funky bass line* when they finally get together). This was an ARC given to me by the author. It has not affected the contents of my review. Vivian Liao used to be a huge fan of comedian Melvin “Mel” Lee, and one of her hobbies was making fan art about him. Then she actually had a chance […]



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