Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What to do when both the title and the back blurb are lies

John Dies at the End by David Wong

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I’m not sure what I was expecting when I picked up John Dies at the End. I think maybe a little bit of Welcome to Night Vale mixed with Sandman Slim, and possible a bit of Men in Black. This book is not any of those things, either in combination or alone. I should also admit that I have not seen the movie, don’t remember having heard of it before, and definitely have no plans to ever watch it now. I did not really enjoy […]

Five stars with some qualifications for this White Whale book.

It by Stephen King

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Well, I did it. I did It. (I’m sure this is adding so much to the ongoing pun-based conversation surrounding this book.) I started this book on January 22nd, and finished it on January 30th. That is a long time to read a book for me, especially at the beginning of the year, when I like to get my momentum up and running with shorter, exciting books. But I’m doing the whole TBR Jar thing this year, and I pulled It out almost immediately. When […]

I’ll be watching you…

Kentukis by Samanta Schweblin

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More than a conventional novel, Kentukis is a collection of glimpses into people’s lives as they deal with the new must have gadgets that have become a worldwide obsession. These gadgets are known as Kentukis, and what they do is establish a connection between the person who owns the Kentuki (a sort of even creepier Furby) and the person who is the Kentuki, that is, the person who bought a connection to look into the life of the person who owns the Kentuki through the […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Agony and Relief: Birth Order as Curse

Secondborn by Amy A. Bartol

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“It’s no good hating them. They can’t feel it, and it will only make you bitter.” — p. unknown  

“I got cabin fever, it’s burning in my brain”

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

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Well this book ripped my jaded, horror-loving heart out and showed it to me. This is the second book by Paul Tremblay that has hurt my feelings. The first being A Head Full of Ghosts published in 2016. While both books give us an intimate and ultimately heart rending family drama with ambiguous endings, they are very different stories. Cabin centers on seven year old Wen and her dads Eric and Andrew. The family has traveled to the titular cabin as part of a getaway […]



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