Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

The Silver Chair (The Chronicles of Narnia, #6) by C.S. Lewis

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I think this might the book in this series I’ve read the least, even below the two books I actually don’t really like all that much (The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle). It’s certainly the book I remembered the least. I remembered the broad strokes, but details had been completely lost to me, which means I didn’t read it enough to burn it into my brain like I did the others. What this meant is that I was able to read this […]

No more Riley Sager books *pour moi*.

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

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I do not understand why people like this author so much. Is it the guaranteed twist at the end? The cliched story elements? The flavorless writing? The overblown dialogue? I’m sorry, everyone who loves this dude* (which is like 90% of Goodreads apparently), but his whole thing just does not work for me. Everything in this story has been done, and done better, in other books. For me, this book wasn’t scary or thrilling at all. I finished it because it’s the literary equivalent of […]

“You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man.”

Native Son by Richard Wright

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My brain is mush today, but I have time to try and catch up on reviews, so I’m going to attempt to review a masterpiece of literature while coasting on an ebb tide of intelligence. This is, I believe, the book I have owned the longest without reading. I’ve moved ten times since I bought it in college for a class that didn’t even end up reading it. I have kept it all this time, through lo so many book purges, because I always meant […]

Won’t be reading the sequels, thank you.

Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1) by Arthur C. Clarke

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This one didn’t work out for me so much. And it tricked me! I was really into it for like the first twenty pages (hard not to pay attention when a giant asteroid pulverizes Italy), but once the crew of the Endeavor were introduced, this book became pretty dull for me. Rendezvous with Rama, which is a Hugo award winner, was published in 1973. I can see how something like this published fifty years ago would have been a big deal. But there are just so many […]

The weakest one of these in a while.

Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny

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Lots of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I really liked the main conceit of the plot, that this old woman makes Gamache, Myrna, and a strange young man named Benedict the liquidators of her will, despite that none of them knew her. The woman, who called herself the Baroness, had a strange and interesting past, and as often happens in these books, a murder occurs. The B-plot of the book follows Cadet Amelia Choquet after she is expelled from the academy […]

“Shakespeare knew too much.”

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

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I really had a good time with this one. I didn’t realize it was YA going in, but while it did lean into YA sensibilities at points, mostly it just felt like a kooky magical adventure story. It was very hard to put down, and I found myself constantly wondering what would happen next, which doesn’t really happen all that often to me anymore because I read so much (usually for me these days I vacillate between “I pretty much know what’s coming” because I’m […]



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