Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Keeping Hope in the Jungle

Sisters Under the Rising Sun by Heather Morris

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The passengers of the Vyner Brooke are pitched from the frying pan to the fire when the ship upon which they have been fleeing the Japanese invasion of Singapore is sunk off the shores of Indonesia. The women and children, musician Norah Chambers and nurse Nesta James among them, must survive in jungle camps until the end of the war. I am continuing my informal journey through the Pacific theatre of World War 2 with Sisters Under the Rising Sun, which chronicles the lives of a […]

A Lineage of Madness

The Noh Mask Mystery by Akimitsu Takagi

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An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I’ve always enjoyed reading works in translation – they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are set – but I definitely haven’t read many genre works. As such, I was intrigued by the prospect of this locked room murder mystery, written in 1949 but never before […]

Biggest K-Pop Stan in the Japanese Underground

The Yakuza's Bias, Volume 1 by Teki Yatsuda

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When the yakuza boss’s daughter drags top lieutenant Ken to a K-Pop concert, he finds himself utterly captivated by the group, especially the main rapper Jun. I only dabble in reading manga, but one genre I have found myself enjoying is light-hearted gag mangas – with one major caveat. The joke’s got to have legs enough for a series, or it will run thin quickly. Luckily, this is not the case with The Yakuza’s Bias. Ken might be a serious, tough-talking yakuza member, but he finds […]

Might have found my worst of the year with my first of the year

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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1.5 stars Warning! This review will contain spoilers, because after my book club discussion yesterday, I’m actually quite cranky about this book, and it’s impossible for me to rant properly if I can’t spoil the heck out of these stories. Don’t worry, you don’t really want to read this book anyway. Also, most of the spoilers are only visible if you go to my blog. In a small, dark basement café in Japan, visitors can travel briefly back in time, if they observe a series […]

“It’s funny. No matter where you go, or how many books you read, you still know nothing, you haven’t seen anything. And that’s life.”

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (#1) by Satoshi Yagisawa

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Behold, the second of two short “ack wait I’m not at my goal” books I read in the past three weeks to try to get to my 52 books a year goal. Am I going to make it? No. But I’ve made peace with it. But onward to the book! Coming in at a mere 150 pages, I came upon this teeny book at a bookstore in Los Angeles (I swear, I just went in to look! I wasn’t going to buy anything! And other […]

The Other Side of the Sun

The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld by Jake Adelstein

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The first time Martin Scorsese called Henry Hill after reading Hill’s gangster memoir Wiseguy, he told Hill: I’ve been waiting for this book for ten years. To which Hill replied: I’ve been waiting for this call for ten years. Scorsese had wanted to tell a tale of mobsters that didn’t revolve around Vito Corleone-esque bosses and power players. He wanted the audience to know about the gangster-next-door, the types he grew up with around Manhattan’s Little Italy. He found the story he was looking for in Hill’s […]



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