Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Around the World Around the World

Night Prayers by Santiago Gamboa

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Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating. Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and […]

I’d like to see the “cozy” come back to this mystery series

What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust by Alan Bradley

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“I know I’m not the girl I once was, but I’m not really sure yet who I am,” Flavia de Luce bemoans at about the midpoint of What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust. While she’s still quite young (I don’t think she’s progressed past 12 in this latest installment), she does carry the weight of adulthood on her shoulders at times. Technically she’s not alone in the world–she has her dear friend-of-the-family-part-time-servant Dogger, grandmotherly housekeeper Mrs. Mullet, bookish sister Daffy (Feely still being away […]

How the World Works

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell & Kit Chellel

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

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Finished two consecutive books on how the world works. Both are good and devastating in their own respective ways Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy When the cargo ship Dalit hit Baltimore’s Key Bridge last year, I felt it deeply, not just because I’m a Baltimorean but because I’ve worked with seafarers in the past. It’s a hard life: dangerous labor with little pay and almost no labor protections. Away from your family months at a […]

Isle Of Amberly

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

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“Wait, what just happened?” is the best review I read for this book. I most heartily concur with that statement. Successful author Grady Green’s wife disappeared on a rainy night one year ago. Since then his life has unraveled and he’s been unable to write or sleep. His agent takes pity on him with the opportunity of a lifetime, to stay at a quiet cabin on a remote Scottish island to try to get some writing done. He and his trusty dog Columbo head off […]

“I would shiver the whole night through”

Knife River (2024) by Justine Champine

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When it comes to mysteries, I find the plot to be almost the least interesting thing–as long as it’s not too lazy or derivative or actively insulting to the reader, and fits into the vibes of the story. What I do care about, then, are the vibes–if the vibes are there, if the texture of the story is something I can snag myself on, I don’t really worry about clues or reveals (which I’m bad at predicting anyway). The vibes are pretty immaculate in Knife […]

Corruption and Colonization (And Kaiju)

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Yes, Robert Jackson Bennett is back! I am an unabashed fan of most of his writing, and was massively impressed when I first read The Tainted Cup, about a year ago. It was delightfully weird and just a little bit creepy; a Holmes and Watson style investigation in a Roman-style setting, topped off with some mycology-based body horror. In The Tainted Cup, the greatest threat the Empire of Khanum faced was not just the murders, but the Leviathans—kaiju-like creatures that emerge from the sea to wreak […]



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