Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I was fifteen when I decided to go to America and make a name for myself,” Allen Say

The Inker's Shadow by Allen Say

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When I learned that Drawing from Memory by Allen Say had a sequel called The Inker’s Shadow I went into “Find This Book” Mode. And interlibrary loan did not let me down. Now, this book is a lot like the first, but deals with his years in the states. It moves a bit faster, covers more ground and years and fills in the information that shows how he was shaped into the author and illustrator that he would become. It is not just a great […]

The Past Is a Different Country

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris

American Monsters by Adam Jortner

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CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind. The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin. This book is […]

Interesting elements but a little disappointing

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto

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Cbr17bingo “I” Published in Japan in 1961, Inspector Imanishi Investigates opens with the battered, bloodied body of an unidentified 50-year-old man found on the train tracks in Tokyo. Those who had seen him earlier in the evening with another younger man indicated that both men spoke with an unusual Japanese accent. As Inspector Imanishi investigates, more unusual deaths follow amongst the very people he wanted to question. While the coroner rules those deaths natural or simply unfortunate, they seem suspicious to Imanishi. As the months […]

Literary fiction that I actually liked

Flashlight by Susan Choi

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The Book: It’s kind of hard to say what Flashlight is about. The summary makes it sound almost like a mystery: Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach, and hours later, she is found soaking wet and half-drowned, and he is nowhere to be found and presumed drowned. But most of the book is less concerned with this mystery than with the complicated family dynamics at play between the four main characters. Louisa’s father, Serk, is Korean, although he was born in […]

In the Early 1980s Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary

My Picture Diary by Maki Fujiwara

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My Picture Diary is an odd little book. It is a day-to-day/day in the life of the author, Maki Fujiwara (also illustrated by) and her family. Things are fairly dull on the surface, but a lot is going on nonetheless. You can see the era (the late 1970s/early 1980s) and the culture and country (Japan); and of course, the husband and wife and the parent(s) and child relationships. The illustrations are simple, but deceptively so. The style itself is not overly detailed, but they do […]

Calvin and Hobbes or Jackson and Irwin adventures?

Jackson's Wilder Adventures V02 Dentistry and Dreams, by Sarah Davidson

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I found a series awhile back that I thought was one of the best I had read. It was Jackson’s Wilder Adventures by Sarah Davidson. It was clever and unique. A young boy, Jackson, and his Calvin and Hobbesesque Hobbes, called Irwin the Thylacine, were the perfect narrators. Davidson mixed time travel in a Dr. Who manner with fun educational facts. Granted, there is no actual Tardis (and/or fill in your favorite doctor), just an old cardboard box, but the adventures were as fun. We […]



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