Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About GentleRain

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Your jack of all trades eccentric. Knows a little about a lot and a lot about a little. Tends to mainly read non-fiction (history, true crime, old gossip, etc), SF/F, horror, graphic novels, "genre" books.

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A Great Collection of Autobio Comics!

Little Tunny's Snail Diaries by Grace Gogarty

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I really love Grace Gogarty’s work and so was thrilled when I saw this collection of autobio comics available for preorder. I hopped right on that and then forgot about it until I got the shipping notice, which was another delightful surprise. I am fully on board with using book preorders as a little gift for myself in the future, it cheers up a rough day. Little Tunny’s Snail Diaries collects a variety of Gogarty’s autobio comics in a really nice edition. The format mimics […]

A Fun Romance/Mystery, Perfect for the Beach or the Airport

Hello, Summer by Mary Kay Andrews

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I am someone who is very sensitive to the formatting and trim size of a novel, so I think a lot of my enjoyment in this novel was partially related to how much I liked the mass market formatting they used. A couple of years ago a lot of publishing companies switched to this taller, skinnier format that doesn’t work well with my hands, but the edition I got at the airport of this book was a more squat square format that was perfect. And […]

Two Very Different But Sweet Autobiographical Manga

The Bride Was A Boy by Chii

Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu by Junji Ito

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The breadth of non-fiction manga is on full display between these two very different books! The Bride was a Boy is a memoir about a trans woman’s experience falling in love and getting married. It’s also a basic primer on what being transgender is like  and a good overview on the Japanese government’s policies on trans people. I know there are enormous problems in the US right now vis a vis trans rights, which terrifies me every day as a trans person, but I’m always glad we […]

Comics Anthologies Can Be A Gamble

Through the Labyrinths of the Mind by Bevan Thomas and Hannah Myers (editors)

Life Finds a Way by Alina Pete and Dan Anctil (editors)

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A comics anthology is always a gamble and I unfortunately found these to be a let down. I don’t want to come off as mean about these anthologies, since they’re done by a charity organization that fosters a nice community of comics creators in British Columbia, but I think the uneven quality is a side effect of their mission. I don’t regret getting these because I will never regret reading comics, even if they’re kind of meh, but I maybe regret the shipping cost from […]

Two Different Viewpoints on Queer Life in Japan

I Want to be a Wall (Vol.1) by Honami Shirono

X-Gender (Vol.1) by Asuka Miyazaki

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I’m very much enjoying the wider variety of manga that’s being translated now, especially the autobiographical and LGBT+ books. These two volumes are a combination of both and I enjoyed them for different reasons. I Want to be a Wall is about an asexual woman and a gay man getting married, seemingly due to societal or family pressures. No one knows that their marriage isn’t straight but them, and the book follows them settling into married life and getting to know each other more. Their […]

“Promise and potential:” Overlooked Vocational School Students in China

Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth by T.E. Woronov

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Stanford University Press was having an 80% off summer sale, which was an amazing deal, so I got a bunch of books that I otherwise would never have thought to purchase since academic press prices are usually prohibitively high. Class Work is the first of the batch that I’ve read, and it was a good start. This is a slim volume that packs a lot of information about the Chinese school system and the impact of testing and government efforts to make or re-mold class structures. […]



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