Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Male Loneliness Epidemic

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

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CBR Square- Red A friend of mine recommended I watch The Magicians, so I picked up the audiobook to see if I would like it in a general way. I had known that the book is pretty different from the tv show but I thought it would give me a general idea. A few years ago there was a big deal made about how men don’t really form deep friendships anymore and there was a male loneliness epidemic. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/17/1263527043/its-been-a-minute-male-loneliness-epidemic-real. I am not fully sure why […]

What’s the opposite of warp speed?

Warp by Lev Grossman

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Lev Grossman’s The Magicians Trilogy is one of my favourite book series of all time (I also understand why it might not be everyone’s cup of tea). I also loved his take on the King Arthur mythos, The Bright Sword, which came out last year. I’ve had one of his earlier novels, Warp, sitting on my shelf for a while now, and it fits my current method of choosing books to quickly reduce my physical TBR pile (i.e., read the shortest ones first), so I […]

cannonball complete on my other favorite book of the year

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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The embarrassment of this book is this: I’m positive I loved this book, but honestly I struggle to remember more than a handful of (rather vivid) scenes from the book. In my defense there are a lot of characters and a lot of mythology (and pop culture!) referenced, so you spend a lot of your brainpower trying to understand what you’re reading and putting it in context of everything else you know about Arthurian retellings. But all in all, this book is a marvel of […]

Is It Coming Home?

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: fanfic. This is Lev Grossman’s take on the King Arthur mythos.  I don’t really know how to write this review because I loved it and I really want to give it my full throated endorsement. But there are things I loved about the book itself and things as an Arthur fan that I both loved and hated. Let’s start here: it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2024. I liked the first Magicians book, less so the other two. […]

Into Shadow Series Review

The Garden by Tomi Adeyemi

Persephone by Lev Grossman

The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow

Undercover by Tamsyn Muir

What the Dead Know by Nghi Vo

The Candles Are Burning by Veronica G. Henry

Out of the Mirror, Darkness by Garth Nix

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Wow. I really wish this series of short stories had been released around Halloween, some of the stories are very good and the horror/fantasy elements are great. There are at least two stories I wish had been longer novels (The Six Deaths of the Saint and Undercover) because of how good they were and how much I didn’t want the stories to be over when I got to the end. “The Garden” by Tomi Adeyemi (2 stars)-This one compared to the other books in the […]

A break from the norm, but everything is too rushed

The Magicians: New Class by Lilah Sturges

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A group of hedge witches are being enrolled at Brakebills as third year students much to the dismay of the students who have been studying at Brakebills since year one. There’s obvious tension between the hedge witches and the Brakebills students, but they’re being forced to work and study together. Initially they’re told it’s to bridge the gap between the two magical worlds, but the students soon learn the truth. They will be learning battle magic, an outlawed practice, in order to be prepared for […]



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