Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

This Is How You Break Your Readers

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

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I don’t think Faintingviolet had even finished this book before promising to hand it off to me. And at this point in our friendship, I don’t question her if she’s recommending a book. I just accept, and this book…..holy moly, this book….. Before we get to why I was utterly destroyed at the hands of This is How You Lose the Time War, we have to go back to my first book recommendation to Faintingviolet. I had read a book called The Illuminator that wrecked […]

The *uick Brown Fox

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

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“I am so fearful, Ella, as to where this all may lead. A silly little letter, to be sure, but I believe its theft represents something quite large and oh so frighteningly ominous.” There is small island called Nollop off the east coast of the United States named after Nevin Nollop, the author of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. In Nollop’s honor they have erected a statue of Nollop’s likeness with his famed sentence hung underneath. One morning, the […]

“How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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I don’t have the time or energy to write as much or as deeply as I would like to about this strange, 100+ year old book, so I’m just going to settle with posting some brief thoughts below. Somehow I managed to make it out of years and years of schooling, with two English degrees, without reading this book. Which is right up my alley! All that discussion of monsters and things that are taboo swathed in metaphor. I love that shit. When I first […]

Like an early draft of your favorite suffragettes in romance, with letters

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This week in the Romance readers back channel one of the many tropes that drives us nuts came up: “this whole manufactured conflict of a couple hundred pages could have been solved by a SINGLE DAMN CONVERSATION.” (h/t kdm). In some ways, that describes the entirety of My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway. At the very core of Romance novels, there is often a single fundamental misunderstanding, and in this one it’s the placing of the two main characters as antagonists to each other by […]

This is how you do young adult fiction.

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Dammit, I knew I should have written this review when I first finished the book, but I decided to push it off because it seemed too hard to try and sum up all my feeeeelings, but joke’s on me, now it’s even harder! Sherman Alexie has been one of my favorite writers since I was in college and one of my English comp teachers made us watch Smoke Signals, which is based off Alexie’s short story, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” and […]

Terrible half-baked review of a really good book.

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I think I’ve really done this book an injustice by waiting so long to review it. (Thanks a lot, Mansfield Park!) I remember being ridiculously entertained by it, and reading it at a pretty fast pace, even for me. But I’ve forgotten most of why I found it so entertaining in the two and a half months since finishing it. This is one of those sci-fi books just waiting to break into the mainstream, because it’s written in a way that will appeal to people who […]



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