Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An unexamined past might come back to bite you on the ass. Literally

Lone Women: A Novel by Victor LaValle

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This short novel is a fascinating combination of history and horror, where history often is the horror. Lone Women is set in a remote homesteading community in Montana in 1915. This sparsely settled country promises adventure, new beginnings, and opportunity for anyone who is willing to take on the hard work of making a life there. Even single women and minorities can have a go. But while this is supposed to be a land of opportunity where neighbors help one another out of necessity if […]

“Wayne Gretzky takes Pierre Trudeau into the boards”

The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy (2018) by Paul Myers

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So I watch a celebrity game show type thing in the UK called Taskmaster, and this season a Canadian comedian called Mae Martin is one of the contestants. I became instantly mildly fixated with them, and watched everything they’d ever done, including a sharp and dark and funny drama on Netflix called Feel Good (2020-21), their stand up set, and a sort of comedian game of chicken called Last One Laughing (Canada) on Prime, which also starred Dave Foley, who I knew from NewsRadio (1995-1999) […]

Jennifer Hale should narrate more audiobooks

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge – Different genres (Sci-fi) 15-word review: Kira touches the wrong alien artifact and things escalate wildly from there. Excellent audio book. The audio book, which even listening at x1.5 speed felt like it lasted approximately forever, is narrated by Jennifer Hale and she does an amazing job. I was surprised to see, that with the exception of this and the upcoming follow-up (the book is set in the same universe, not sure if it’s a sequel, prequel, or companion novel), she has […]

Mothers, sisters, and daughters

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls: A Novel by Anissa Gray

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TW: Grief, abusive relationships, eating disorders The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is an outstanding novel that deals with very difficult, triggering topics: parental loss/grief, abusive relationships and eating disorders. The narration is shared by the three adult Cochran sisters over the period of about a month. During that time, the reader witnesses a family spiraling downward but fighting to stay together in the face of powerfully destructive forces.  The novel opens with Althea, the eldest Cochran sister, in jail for committing fraud. […]

That’s a lotta corpses, bro

A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames

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I liked the other Jonathan Ames books I’ve read, and learned ten seconds ago that he’s the creator of Bored to Death, which, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a show on HBO Max (which I haven’t seen, but which multiple people have told me I’d like). Anyway. A guy named Happy Doll – for real, his parents named him that…seriously? a little much right off the bat – is an ex-cop who’s now a fairly unsuccessful, i.e., not busy,  private detective. A friend comes […]

A brief history of the Soviet Union and an homage to Casablanca

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel by Amor Towles

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There’s a lot to love about this novel: the writing, the characters, the author’s knowledge of Russian history and literature. The premise behind the novel may seem a bit fantastical, but somehow Amor Towles makes me believe it and want it to be true. In 1922, fictional Count Alexander Rostov was brought before a Revolutionary court and found guilty of being an enemy of the people. Given his class, he might have been executed, but in 1913 Rostov had written poetry sympathetic to revolutionary ideals, […]



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