Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

how much is folklore and how much is just a mad ramble?

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

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Alan Garner is a titan of British literature, but it took two other lions of language and a slow day in the shop for me to finally crack open one of his tales. Why did I wait so long? Treacle Walker is exactly the kind of woodsy weirdness that calls to me from the gloam. It was a snowy evening and dead quiet in the bookstore. Every task was complete, everything that could be tidied was tidy beyond tidy, and I had some time to […]

Two more Odd Thomas novels that were OK

Odd Hours (Odd Thomas #4) by Dean Koontz

Odd Apocalypse (Odd Thomas #5) by Dean Koontz

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OK, so I made it to book 4 of the Odd Thomas series.  I don’t know.  I really liked the first book.  Each subsequent book gets weirder and weirder though.  And don’t get me wrong, I’m ok with weird.  It’s almost like each book tries to out-weird the one before it though.  We meet AnnaMaria too, and she’s just a lot.  She’s supposed to be this super charismatic, charming person.  To me she just read as annoyingly vague?  Nothing she said made sense or really […]

The hell did I just read?

The Obsoletes by Simeon Mills

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I don’t mind weird – and weird this was indeed – but I’ve watched enough Adult Swim at two AM in college to be all full up on weirdness for it’s own sake. And this definitely felt aimless. The story of two brothers who are secretly robots in a 1990s where robots are common and feared by the general populace, Darryl embraces his nature while his brother Kanga denies it and strives to be as human as possible. Darryl tries to keep a low profile, […]

The movie Wes Anderson should have made

Your Robot Dog Will Die by Arin Greenwood

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Apparently this is the year I read all the dead dog books. So . . . sorry for that! TW: Animal cruelty, animal death. In a near future, scientists showcased exactly how terrible humans are by genetically trying to improve on animals. (As if there is anything to improve on in any animal.) Their experiments went extremely wrong, however, when dogs suddenly stop wagging their tales, and suddenly are no longer man’s best friend. As the effects of this tragedy sweep the nation and dogs […]

I came to this book both too early and too late

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Well, this book ages really, really poorly. Some spoilers below. It reads exactly like the time it was written (1989): “progressive” enough to include, at least superficially, a cast of characters including a same-sex couple and people of color in mixed-race relationships, as well as treatment of the AIDS epidemic and drug abuse that leans more sympathetic than condemning. However, it’s not exactly “woke” enough to avoid stumbling into some major Don’t Do That’s. Weetzie, pixie bohemian darling protagonist, is signified as being creative and […]

“The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you.”

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I’m a sucker for a book that promises to be a mind-bender and has a bunch of people talking about how weird it is. Enter Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. The series is about Area X, a strip of coastline that’s been reclaimed by nature and is being shielded from the general public as a military-protected “ecological disaster site.” In the decades since Area X was formed, various expedition teams have gone through the border with the mission of documenting just […]



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