Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About BookNinja

CBR 7
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Obsessive reader. Poor follow-through..

BookNinja's Reviews:

Sleeves and stacks

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

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Altered Carbon recently became a Netflix series, so I decided to do it the wrong way round – I watched and then read it. I know there’s more in the series, so I wanted to see if I liked the writing style so that I could explore further. In the world of Altered Carbon, people’s memories are stored in their “stacks”, in the back of their necks. People’s bodies are a “sleeve”, and those wealthy enough can rent sleeves, clone them, alter them, etc. Those […]

Michael Connolly gets his two detectives together

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connolly

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Dark Sacred Night is the first time Ballard and Bosch get together, but I’m not sure if they are greater together. At this point, Bosch is dealing with the ramifications of a previous case, where he met and became close to a drug addict who is haunted by her daughter’s death. Ballard is working solo for the whole book, as her partner is on leave. I’m not sure it would be possible to read this book out of sequence – knowing the background for both […]

Crime solving in Echo Park

Echo Park by Michael Connelly

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Michael Connelly’s Bosch series are really enjoyable crime novels – Bosch is a detective who works really hard and is determined to solve crimes, even to the extent of being haunted by unsolved cases that are decades old. While the crimes can be unpleasant, Connelly doesn’t seem to relish his victims’ pain, and the detective shows appropriate disgust and disquiet when dealing with them. An insight is given to the police system, and how different politics can affect law enforcement. I’ve read a number of Bosch […]

#swordbae may be hot, but he’s not great at resolving conflict

A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole

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I really enjoyed A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole when I read it last year, and promptly read A Duke by Default. Rereading it over New Year crystallised a few things for me, so this is a spoiler-riffic review, with some mild criticism. Background – the story is about Portia, who applies to apprentice in Scotland to make swords, and promptly falls for Tavish, the sword craftsman. While updating the business’ website, she researches more about the area and the ancient building it is […]

Stealing sperm is not ok!

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Apologies in advance if I am insulting someone’s favourite SEP! Susan Elizabeth Phillips had been recommended to me as someone to read if you loved Jennifer Crusie, and I really love Crusie. (I keep rereading Bet Me, which I should go back and upgrade to a five on my previous reviews. And Manhunting. All the Crusies get reread about every six months. Anyway!) The problem is, I should have read the recommendations more carefully to see that the latter ones are amazing, but the earlier […]

Cleaning up Cthulu

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The Laundry Files had been recommended to me as a series before, and this time it was a book shop employee pushing them, so I picked it up. The book took me about two weeks to read. I carried it to and from work, and always found a reason to read something else. (Though the news these days is very distracting..) Normally I read much faster than that! The book is a mix of an old school spy novel (he describes his influences as Len […]



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