Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ghostly and Green

Toilet-bound Hanako-kun vol.22 by Aidalro

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Bingo 22: Green The cover is green. Thematically, there’s a potential sense of a potential new season of life (kind of a stretch but possible)., like spring means natural green coming back. Toilet-bound Hanako-kun (vol 22) is a weird little ghost story, sometimes going for spooky, sometimes going for cutesey. This volume jumps into one adventure, finishes the first segment, and cues up the next part of the arc. The time-keeper supernaturals have ‘arrested’ Yashiro whose been turned into a toddler along with Hanako, Amane […]

Komi has to fight for her school, her friend, and maybe her boyfriend too

Komi Can't Communicate vol. 29 by Tomohito Oda

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Palate cleanser was needed so I went for a volume of Komi Can’t Communicate (v.29). In yet another improbable (and stupid if you think about it too hard) situation, Komi and pals’ school is in danger of being shut down because the 20-something nepo-baby in charge got drunk and made a wager. Now, Komi, Tadano, et al. have to compete in a trivia game, and go to camp to do it. That’s plot thread 1. Plot thread  is that it turns out that the star […]

World’s Most Dangerous Flight School

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

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I know people who read the Fourth Wing and raved about it; I picked it up in a bookstore, saw that it used first-person present-tense narration, and put it back immediately. I saw it at the library, and decided to give it another chance. I struggled to get into it, and then I saw a social media post of a bookstore display with the signed “worst books ever”; the two things on that table I have read I kind of believe deserve to be there. […]

Yer a killer, Cliff!

Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

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It took me a bit longer to read Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide than I’d figured initially. This is actually a pretty interesting and entertaining murder mystery where the mystery is not who dies or who dunnit; it’s how the would be ‘deletist’ (we don’t say ‘killer’ here) will achieve their goal while not getting caught and still observing the 4 main principles of ‘deletion’ (we don’t’ say ‘murder’):  Is this murder necessary? Have you given your target every last chance to […]

Ducks and biscuits and footnotes and fireworks

How to Be Brave by Daisy May Johnson

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A number of classic children’s stories start with death or dislocation: Anne leaves her orphanage for Green Gables, Mary crosses the ocean to arrive at Misselthwaite Manor and discover the Secret Garden, Papa Alcott is absent at the Civil War front, leaving his Little Women to fend for themselves–and, in a more explicit early twentieth-century influence of Johnson’s, the orphan and impoverished Bettany sisters head to the Austrian Alps to start the Chalet School. The disruption of normal life, and a stable family unit, is […]

A Kafna, a Kokwa, a Kadoh, and a Kokopah walk into a classroom and I don’t know what all this means

Magus of the Library vol 4 by Mitsu izumi

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I saw a cartoon a long time ago (XKCD I suspect) that suggested that the more made-up terminology a fantasy story had, the more suspicious of quality it might be. Magus of the Library (vol. 4) is a partial example behind why this might be so; what’s being set up is actually interesting and I like the world so far, but since it’s been a while since I’ve read volume 3, there are quite a few technical terms about the fantasy world that I don’t […]



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