Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Why Have I Waited So Long to Read This?

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes Volume I by Neil Gaiman

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Since the show came out on Netflix, about six different people have asked me if I’m watching “Sandman,” since they know I’m a huge Gaiman fanatic. But I have not. Mostly because I don’t have Netflix, but also because I’ve never read the source material, and I’m a stickler for reading the book before seeing the media. So I finally started Sandman. Why did I wait so long???? My guess, personally, is being a little afraid of the Graphic Novel. It’s an irrational fear, and when […]

Neil Gaiman is My Chesterson

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman

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I’ve had The View from the Cheap Seats on my TBR for a long time. For once, the university library had a book I actually wanted to read, so I checked it out while waiting for my local library request to come in. Gaiman’s collected nonfiction rides the gamut from his introductions to many novels, to speeches given at award ceremonies and conventions and interviews from his career as a journalist, as well as musings on writing and recollections on the people and books that have […]

Bingo #4

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

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In an effort to read some spooky literature for this, the high holy season of Halloween, I went for one of my comfortable standbys, good old Neil Gaiman. Winning both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 2003 and 2004 for best novella, Coraline deserves all the acclaim it received. Clocking in at only a little over 100 pages, Gaiman works his magic to build a terrifying little universe in a short space. Even though this book was in the children’s section of my library, […]

Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]

Right In the Feels, Every Time

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This book destroys me every time. Everything about it so so achingly beautiful and also so vividly terrifying. It’s a thin and unassuming little book that turns on you about 3 pages in and I love it. Gaiman perfectly captures the reminiscing of childhood and the actual child perspective in the same story as our narrator remembers a terrible event that happens when he’s seven. But Gaiman makes a remarkable craft choice in that he writes most of the narrative from the seven year-old’s point […]

“But. My hammer,” said Thor.

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Before I read it, it felt like I’d been waiting for Norse Mythology my entire life. In the sense that I wanted it so badly the minute that I heard that it was coming. So, oops. It’s fine, but it’s not, like, life-alteringly amazingly incredible. I could have waited another minute before reading it. Taken a breath. Read something else. Taken this to the beach. Which isn’t to say it’s not a delight, it’s just that it doesn’t take a thing and change everything you’ve […]



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