Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About auntadadoom

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Former ethical hacker who stopped hacking but kept being ethical. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: auntadadoom's Quick Questions interview.)

auntadadoom's Reviews:

It’s true, they do do that

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

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We Solve Murders is the first book I read this year, and still the best. It’s by Richard Osman, writer of the Thursday Murder Club series (which I have since started, and which I also like, but not as much). It’s also probably the first of a new series but so far the only entry. The central pair of sleuths here are a father- and daughter-in-law, which is at least fresh. The daughter-in-law is a high-class bodyguard who’s protecting a super-successful later-in-life author whose main […]

Tee hee a brothel how scandale

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry by Elinor Lipman

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So the premise is, our heroine takes over an estate sale business when her parents retire, and then oo la la a potential client turns out to be a brothel, should she take the gig? The naughtiness of the very thought! Frissons! Palpitations! This is nominally a rom com and kinda gestures towards cozy mystery, but it doesn’t do either convincingly. I very much should have DNFed this, but I was in a writing group where we had to report in “what I’ve been reading” […]

Billionaire reform starts with a good book

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

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The Uncommon Reader is a little hard to classify — I guess it’s alternate history? — but the premise is essentially that Elizabeth II happens upon a bookmobile, starts reading a lot, and Is Changed. This is a book for book lovers, and specifically, for deepish Anglo-biased “classic” catalog readers (George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, EM Forster … but also some non-Anglo authors e.g. Vikram Seth, Tolstoy). Like, if you read Ready Player One and your reaction was “this is not for me, this is for […]

I refuse to research this any further, by which I mean, at all

In The Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm

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What do you know about Sigmund Freud? I’ll tell you what I *think* I know. I *think* he was a very early investigator into the realm of human psychology, and tried to help his patients to identify the root causes of their malaise. I also *think* he formulated incredibly elaborate and detailed ideas around the general common causes of psychological distress, and I *think* this was based mostly on, like, 40 patients? Something like that. And a lot of his theories involved butts and other […]

Boooooo Trash DON’T

The October Country by Ray Bradbury

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This was a Did Not Finish, on account of I hated it. Hokay, so, The October Country. This is a collection of Bradbury short stories, and the first one is about a dwarf (it’s called, inventively, “The Dwarf”) who is a regular at a carnival with a house of mirrors where there’s a room where he can see himself as tall, and of course that’s all he wants to do and isn’t it so self-evident that it’s grotesque and he’s grotesque and he couldn’t possibly […]

Kraft mac-n-cheese, but there’s some ham & broccoli mixed in

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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Scythe, by Neal Shusterman, is a high-concept dystopian YA that came out a little later (2016) than some of the blockbuster successes of the subgenre — which is a damn shame, because it’s extremely competently done. Way way way better than, say, Divergent or The Maze Runner. The world-building premise is that society has conquered natural death thanks to the emergence of an all-governing, all-wise AI called the Thunderhead, and the subsequent development of cures and healing nanites that can revitalize people if they die — […]



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