Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In which we have an abundance of evidence that Tolkien *really* had a thing for eagles.

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

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This is a book, like The Lord of the Rings, that I think I will appreciate more each time I read it. The only time I’d read it before this was my senior year of high school during the height of my LOTR fervor, and it entirely overwhelmed me. I remember I had to have a notebook near me while reading on which I drew a lot of family trees. I had a need to keep all the elves and endless descendants of Beor straight. […]

“She was probably wearing real Chanel Vamp nail polish, not knockoff Revlon Vixen”

Justine by Forsyth Harmon

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Ali is bored, lonely, and smitten. Justine is bold, aloof, and irresistible. The girls meet in a Long Island Stop & Shop in the summer of 1999. I’ve been quoting from this song a lot lately, but as John Darnielle said so perfectly in “Old College Try”: Things will shortly get completely out of hand There is something visceral about peeking back into the mind of a suburban tri-state-area teen. This book stuck with me like the frequently mentioned feeling of bare thighs sticking to […]

Fairyland is calling

Letters from Fairyland by Charles van Sandwyk

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As a Christmas present my mum bought me this lovely little folio edition – Letters from Fairyland. It’s a tiny book of only 24 pages long but is a beautiful concept. The author and artist Charles van Sandwyk has illustrated books like Alice in Wonderland for the Folio Society before and also wrote a book called “How to see Fairies”. This acts as a follow up with the premise that a child wrote to him about wanting to spot fairies in their garden and this […]

Revisiting The Folk of the Air, with more Cardan and Jude

How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories by Holly Black

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Spoiler warning! Don’t read this book, or review unless you’ve finished the entire trilogy of The Folk of the Air. The Cruel Prince is the place to start. This companion book, which I suspect would clock in at novella-length if you removed all the beautiful full-colour illustrations throughout by Rovina Cai, works as part prequel and part sequel to The Folk of the Air trilogy, as well as an alternate POV to several of the series’ events, especially in The Cruel Prince, where Prince Cardan is possibly at his most loathsome. In […]

Doing everything I can to complete my double Cannonball

King Baby by Kate Beaton

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See, some people might accuse me of desperation at this point, reviewing a 32-page children’s book I’ve read to my son more times than I can consciously count, considering he’s now nearly three, and my husband and I started reading it to him when he was only just a baby himself, long before he had any grasp of what the book was actually about or what the illustrations showed. Those people might not be entirely wrong. I have, however,  come to the conclusion that due […]

“Morituri Nolumus Mori … Er, roughly speaking, it means, ‘We who are about to die don’t want to.’”

The Last Hero (Discworld, #27) by Terry Pratchett

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It’s been a while since I’ve visited the Discworld. I usually try to read two or three a year, but I only managed to read one in 2019. Plus I had to track down a copy of this since my library didn’t have it, and then I never got around to reading it over the summer like I was supposed to. As always, should have read it sooner. This book tickled me. This is actually considered the 27th full book of the series, despite it […]



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