Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Four legs good, two legs bad”

Animal Farm by George Orwell

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Nowhere Books Bingo 25: Banned Book Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Cover featuring an animal On Manor Farm, somewhere in England, an old boar gathers all the animals in the barn and makes a powerful speech about how animals suffer at the hands of humans and should rise up and take power for themselves. Shortly after his death, the animals of Manor Farm do just that – they violently fight back when Farmer Jones and his farmhands try to control them and chase the farmer, his […]

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

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CBR16 BINGO: Horses, because Gulliver spends several years with the Houyhnhnms, a highly rational race of talking horses Take a nice, English surgeon and send him around the world, where he encounters all sorts of heretofore unknown races, and eventually he’ll come back absolutely hating on humanity. Gulliver’s Travels is so ingrained in popular culture that everyone knows something about it. I can’t remember my first introduction to the story, but it was probably in the form of a children’s comic book or animated special. […]

“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name…”

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

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3.5 stars Nowhere Books Bingo: Banned books (Wasn’t published until 27 years after Bulgakov’s death, and only then in a censored version. ) CBR16 Bingo: Cult (cult classic, and there’s the whole Devil and his entourage as a central plot point – that’s pretty cultish, right?) I can’t remember exactly how long The Master and Margarita has been on my TBR list, but it’s certainly more than twenty years. A quick glance on Goodreads shows me that 15 of my friends have rated it four […]

Yes, the title means they are stoned.

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

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Thanks to NetGalley and Recorded Books for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. This is genuinely one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. It has a lot of flaws baked in. The worldbuilding is there but never explained, there is so much going on that none of it really fully works: lesbian stoner buddy comedy, political satire, the alternate history and fantasy elements, a romance . . . I spent a large portion of the book very confused. And yet, […]

Ms. Was told me this book was a gem and, by gum, she was right!

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

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As a book lover, nothing delights me more than when a friend recommends a book to me and, after reading it, I’m able to go back and tell her that I unequivocally loved it. For a few years now, Ms. Was has been singing the praises of The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, and now I’m finally able to say, “Thank you for introducing me to this gem.” Brangwain Spurge is an elf entrusted with an important mission: Enter the land of the goblins and deliver […]

Two very different novels from a very English author

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

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Graham Greene was a prolific English writer who, in addition to writing over 25 novels, wrote movie treatments and screenplays. Probably his most famous adaptation was for the Orson Welles classic The Third Man, based on Greene’s own novella of the same name. The author conceived of The Tenth Man in the 1940s while working for MGM, but nothing happened with the draft for 40 years. When MGM sold the rights in 1983, the buyer allowed Greene to revise and publish the novel, giving us […]



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