Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ladies and Gentlemen, the (reading) Weekend…

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John-Barker, Julia Scheele (illustration)

Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins

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Read a variety of books close to and over the weekend. Let’s check it out… Bleeding Edge **** This is a 2021 reread and it’s better than I remember. The ending disappoints but it’s still an entertaining, prescient novel. Pynchon warned us about Too Online culture and yet, here we are.   Times Square Red, Times Square Blue **** I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. And I liked it! Mostly. This is like a tale of two books. It’s two essays […]

Ghost in the Machine

U Up? by Cate Disabato

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In the end, this one receives the thinnest of four stars. I’m nudging it over the line because I think it has a lot going for it, even with the protagonist driving me absolutely bonkers for the last 20-30 pages. I guess I should start with the positives: I like Catie Disabato’s writing. She has a gift for creating real, believable characters, even the ghost ones. Her vision of how witchcraft works in this world: that mediums have the power to see ghosts, with certain […]

Reading a CBR Book Exchange Gift. Thanks again, andtheIToldYouSos!

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

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I almost feel like I’m not smart enough to review this book. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it a lot! But I just don’t think I’m up to the task of pulling it apart for meaning, which it is practically begging you to do. And yet, what I like about it is how unpretentious it is. Confessions of the Fox is a piece of historical fiction that tells the story of Jack Sheppard, infamous thief and renegade, who is also a folk hero. The […]

Great premise about a character who is freed from a cult but wants to go back; did not like where he went with it.

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara

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I am going to continue reading this author’s books because I always find them compelling and interesting, but I think I might have to get the next one from the library instead of buying a pricey hardcover on the back of a tasty premise. This one is making me feel saucy. I was really looking forward to this book! The premise sounded amazing, and I love reading about cults, fictional or not. But the author took it in a direction that I thought was the […]

“Everyone’s just pretending they have it together, because they don’t realize everyone else is pretending to have it together. None of our dumbasses actually have it together.”

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

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The one where a buttoned up graduate student gets drunk gay married in Vegas and her life is turned upside down. This is a very good debut not completely to my tastes. Mostly it just felt overwritten in parts. There were many instances of sentences where you could just lop off the last part of it and the impact would have been much greater. And the excessive poetic repetition really got to me. I was particularly annoyed every time Grace mentioned that Yuki and/or her […]

“Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.”

The Stonewall Reader by The New York Public Library

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This is a book that has immense historical value, but I had a very hard time paying attention to it. Partly, this is due to my own expectations, and partly due to the format. I was expecting a book mostly about the actual events of Stonewall itself, first of all. That’s not really what this is. Only about a third of it focuses on the actual riots, the middle section. The first section focuses on pre-Stonewall writings by queer authors, and the final third does […]



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