Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Adulting from books

A little course in Crochet by DK

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Bingo 5: Adulthood So I’m taking the ‘adulthood’ square as in the sense of ‘adulting’. There area few skills that I’ve long kind of wanted to master or at least gain competence in that might fall under this category, including learning to crochet. I learned how to knit in college out of a book (my grandmother tried to teach me as a kid but I don’t think I was really interested at the time), so now I’m coming back to the single needle again. I’ve […]

Good old fashioned pop culture salutes

Villains' Vignettes Volume 1 by Drew Hayes

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Bingo 4: Hold Steady Drew Hayes has been one of very few authors who has been both reasonably consistent and prolific without getting dull; he’s also a favorite of mine, so for all those reasons, he counts as Holding Steady. What’s new is that Villains’ Vignettes Vol 1 is a story without a connecting plot building; the three tales are a bit long to be short stories, so maybe we’ll call them novelettes. The style somehow manages to be straightforward but still have snappy dialogue […]

“you underestimate the detective instinct of village life”

The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie

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Bingo row 2, dwelling–the titular vicarage/crime scene. The vicarage in England is where the pastor of the Anglican Church lives–it’s usually associated with teas with the church ladies and sermon-composing and parish administration, rather than murder–especially the murder of a church warden. The cover of my edition is annoyingly irrelevant–the vicarage is far more important than the graveyard. We find out far more about the vicarage as a crime scene than as a dwelling here; Christie tends to sketch rather than paint a background. We […]

There’s so much more to the world than we know

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

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CBR15 BINGO: In the Wild, because it’s about animal senses (which is pretty wild!) A bug called a treehopper communicates by creating vibrations through its abdomen. A dog’s olfactory sense is so acute that it can tell twins apart by their smell. Shore birds called red knots use their bills to feel prey under the sand. These are a few of the amazing sensory tales that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong reveals in An Immense World. More than a collection of animal facts, An Immense […]

The darker side of science

The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science by Sam Kean

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CBR15 BINGO: Violence, for murder, icepick lobotomies, cruelty, and general skulduggery described in this book The Icepick Surgeon is the latest book by Sam Sean, my favorite science writer. If you haven’t read any of his books (like this one, or this one, or this one, or this one), they delightfully balance science with history in a series of true-life tales. As the the title indicates, The Icepick Surgeon explores the darker side of science, citing examples of how humankind has benefited from some really reprehensible […]

The Limits of a Good Metaphor

King of Immortal Tithe by Ben Alderson

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Listen: it’s fundamentally really tricky to pull off a romance when the premise for their connection is that this is the ONLY person who can physically touch you and not die. Our basics here are fairly simple: our ingenue protagonist is abducted in a kind of marriage trade to a fae prince whose touch drains people’s life force, causing instant death. Except it doesn’t work on our hero. Possibly because he’s already dying. And that creates an instant connection. But that premise only goes so far, right? […]



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