Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ali Wong is a funny lady

Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets and Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

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Nowhere Books Bingo: About someone you want to learn more about I don’t think I’d heard of Ali Wong before her first Netflix special, Baby Cobra. I’ve now seen all her stand-up specials and also enjoyed Always Be My Maybe, a fun romantic comedy she wrote and starred in with Randall Park, and famously got Keanu Reeves to star as himself. I’ve heard very good things about Beef, but there’s just too much TV out there at the moment, and too little time (especially if […]

Sometimes you just need to read a gay fish isekai comedy novel

The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish (Volume 1) by Xue Shan Fei Hu

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This was such a fun treat! I saw this on TikTok and then looked at it a couple of times at the bookstore until I couldn’t resist anymore and gave in. I’m glad I did because I really did enjoy this and am looking forward to the next three volumes. I like a complete series and this one is done and just needs to be translated and published over here. This was the first danmei novel I’ve read, but I knew about some of the […]

Biggest K-Pop Stan in the Japanese Underground

The Yakuza's Bias, Volume 1 by Teki Yatsuda

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When the yakuza boss’s daughter drags top lieutenant Ken to a K-Pop concert, he finds himself utterly captivated by the group, especially the main rapper Jun. I only dabble in reading manga, but one genre I have found myself enjoying is light-hearted gag mangas – with one major caveat. The joke’s got to have legs enough for a series, or it will run thin quickly. Luckily, this is not the case with The Yakuza’s Bias. Ken might be a serious, tough-talking yakuza member, but he finds […]

“Perfect timing. Perfect delivery. Jackie was blessed with utter confidence in his own talent.”

Jackie, Oy! by Jackie Mason with Ken Gross

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My mom got this for me for Christmas due to my interest in Frank Sinatra (Jackie Mason was nearly killed due to his jokes about Frank Sinatra, and he was beaten up in a separate incident for the same reason). Mason denies the jokes in this book and says there were a lot of comedians with the last name Mason at the time who could have made them, but I had trouble believing that and the tone of that section was strange. It felt like […]

There are two types of people in the world: people who like heavy metal, and dicks

A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill

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Okay I knew this is right up my alley when I heard that. This is one of the more entertaining audiobooks I have listened to this year. Not only is Andrew O’Neill a very colourful and energetic writer, he’s also an excellent narrator with an almost limitless amount of enthusiasm for the subject at hand. Metalheads are an argumentative lot that love being contrarian and are more than eager to split into separate little sub-cultures at the drop of a hat. They are a broad, […]

“For whom the wedding bells toll”

Sofia Khan is Not Obliged (2015) by Ayisha Malik

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I wrote a review of Dorothy B. Hughes’s bleak noir novel Ride the Pink Horse (1946) as part of my Bingo this year, and said something about how it implodes comforting myths, and Emmalita commented, which was lovely, about how she came back to romance because sometimes people need escape from noir and need comforting myths (I paraphrase). I chewed this over in my head for a few weeks, and ended up digging out an unread romance novel I bought a while back, Sofia Khan […]



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