Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Finally getting through a few story collections I have been picking at and one brand new one.

American Gothic Tales; American Supernatural Tales; Her Body and Other Parties; Honeydew by Joyce Carol Oates; ST Joshi; Carmen Maria Machado; Edith Pearlman

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American Gothic Tales – Ed. Joyce Carol Oates 5/5 Stars Joyce Carol Oates knows her stuff. Her introduction to this collection her focus on the Gothic as the selection process makes this an incredibly satisfying collection because it’s not all one type of story. So while on the one had you do in fact get a bunch of ghost stories, you also get stories that are eerie or disturbing or full of murder, and you get stories that are off-putting but not directly scary stories, […]

“One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”

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One of things that I love about Goodreads is that it helps you discover sequels that you never knew existed. When I logged my review of Neverwhere a couple weeks ago, Goodreads called it Neverwhere (London Below, The World of Neverwhere), indicating that other stories must exist in the series! In this instance, it referred to a short story called How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Google told me it was published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, so…here we are! While the story of […]

A Worthy Tribute

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I’m a huge fan of Ray Bradbury, but I actually found this in the process of hunting down a copy of Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, which is included in this collection. Pretty much every story here is a winner, though, and definitely worth reading for Bradbury fans. Here’s a full list of everything included. I particularly enjoyed Lee Martin’s Cat on a Bad Couch, Jacqueline Mitchard’s Two Of A Kind, Charles Yu’s Earth: (A Gift Shop) and Julia Keller’s Hayleigh’s Dad. Overall, though, there aren’t any duds. And I really liked […]

Jellies aside, I’m not a huge fan of The Zeppo. But I really liked this Patrick Ness book.

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Strange that I read these two books back-to-back. I didn’t intend to. I borrowed The Rest of Us Just Live Here from a friend, and picked up Geektastic at the library on a whim — the covers looked so similar, I just couldn’t resist. I’m glad I read Geektastic first, because I was so disappointed in it, that Patrick Ness couldn’t help but make me feel better. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd should be amazing. Its a collection of short stories from authors I […]

I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills

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It’s a terrible feeling to hear praise heaped upon a new book, read it yourself and…not get it. Your mind starts playing games with itself: Everyone else liked this book, what’s wrong with you? Do you just not understand it? Is that it, you idiot?  You focus on the book a little harder, maybe if you squint at the freaking book, all of this praise will make sense. But still…it’s just not there for you. That was my experience with Kelly Link’s collection of short […]

“The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.”

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I definitely borrowed this book based solely on the presence of a short story by Rainbow Rowell, but I’ve read books by some of these other authors, too — David Levithan and Gayle Forman (Forman’s story in this was one of my favorites). And I know Holly Black’s name (The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which I will eventually get around to reading, I promise!). Basically, if you like young adult fiction, you’ve probably read at least one of these authors. And you should probably read this, […]



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