Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence, my therapist once said.”

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

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Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book set on vacation   Official plot summary (because it’s better than anything I could come up with): Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.   Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.   It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor […]

From Diabolical Dart Frogs to Kissing Kiwis and beyond

The Dangerous Alphabet Book  by DK Ryland

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While alternative alphabet books are not new, The Dangerous Alphabet Book  has a clever concept. We start off with the usual A is for something that is nice, normal, familiar. But in the middle of that an Alligator jumps in and hijacks the tale. By wanting to mix things up, make things a little edgy, and make it dangerous, they cause all sorts of mischief and mayhem to ensue. Of course, our first narrator fights this change, until they realize maybe it is a little […]

I might be too old for this

The Unofficial TikTok Cookbook by Valnetina Mussi

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Bingo 2: Arts square The Unofficial TikTok Cookbook as you might suspect is as much about making things look pretty/interesting as it is about making tasty edibles, thus art.  Full disclosure: I’m not on TikTok. I don’t care enough or really have the time to go down that path.  I do appreciate that the book starts with a discussion of what makes something go viral and gets into some of the logistics of being a successful content creator, and features comments throughout on how to […]

Probably best to skip the mystery dumplings at the night market

Time Loops & Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau

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4.5 stars Thank you to Netgalley, Jackie Lau and Atria Books for this ARC. My opinions are my own. Noelle Tom feels like she’s in a rut. She’s underappreciated at work, she doesn’t have much of a social life to speak of, and she’s pretty much given up on love and dating. Having worked late yet another Friday evening, Noelle goes to the night market and buys some dumplings from a mysterious old woman who claims they will “give her what she needed most”. Unfortunately, […]

A hopeful future with robots and food

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

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If you need a story of chosen family and hope and good food, Automatic Noodle absolutely fits the bill. This is a delightful novella of a near-future where California has split from the United States after war, and part of California progressiveness was to give civil rights to human equivalent embodied intelligence (HEEI) robots. But those rights are limited – they’re not able to use a bank, own property, and there’s lots of prejudice against robots (very allegorical to American attitudes towards immigrants and marginalized […]

Back to basics in a good way

Plant Based Cookbook by Trish Sebben-Krupka

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I somehow only just realized that the bargains shelves at Barnes and Noble actually have an online equivalent; I was trying to reach a threshold of some sort (maybe sped X to get Y off?) and found the $5 Plant Based Cookbook. It’s kind of basic, but I still think it might have been a good impulse grab, so to speak. I think what this one’s going to be best for is a set of recipes including things I remember liking before but not quite […]



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