Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Dreadful in name only

Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw

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Yay for new kinda favorite series! The thing for me that distinguishes a favorite from something enjoyable is how re-readable a book is. While I was waiting for the second book to get to my mailbox, I reread the first, and it was as much fun as the first time. After reading Dreadful Company (book 2), I started rereading it about a week later. Still fun. Dreadful Company features many of the same characters from the first novel including Dr. Greta Helsing, physician to things […]

Sorely Lacking Keanu Reeves. One Star.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, […]

Kill Your Darlings

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Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally […]

You’ll write many stories, but every one will be to some greater or lesser degree about this story.

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I am, in all honesty and with true sincerity, starting to question reality. Remember when I read The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower #2) and complained that King needs an editor because he shouldn’t be referring to his own work (the film version of The Shining) as content experienced by new characters in this totally different world? And then I read Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower #4) and I was like, “TUBE NECK HOW DARE YOU?!” but then totally turned around on it, and […]

First the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.

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Homestretch on Ye Olde Darke Towere Marathone! I’m actually starting to be sad that there are only two left plus the movie. And there had better be whole bunch of those, too, is what I’m saying, do ya. If I’m being honest, I think that Stephen King didn’t start leaning into the conceit of this series until about the time that I went all in, and that’s probably the reason I was finally able to invest fully. The more I think about it, the clearer […]

The original vampire-ess

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Bram Stoker may have been the first to perfect the literary vampire, but he was certainly not the first to creep people out with a good monster. Carmilla was here first (by over 20 years), and she is perfectly frightening herself. After a carriage crashes near their remote forest estate, our narrator Laura and her father agree to take in a young woman as their guest while her mother travels on and promises to return for her. Not too surprisingly, young girls in the nearby village […]



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