Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An Interesting Woman in a Sharp Suit

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark

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A Dead Djinn in Cairo is like a bonbon. It’s perfect exactly as it is, but it leaves you wanting more, more, more. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the interesting woman in the sharp suit, and we are dropped into her world with little fanfare. In Clark’s Cairo of 1912, the British and the French tried to colonize Egypt, but the sudden arrival of magical creatures drove them out. Some 40 years earlier, a man named al-Jahiz opened a portal allowing all kinds of djinn, […]

Literary Lessons in Dystopic World

Bungo Stray Dogs vol 16 by Kafka Asagiri, Sango Harukagawa

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I’ve been following this manga series for a while, and I think I was starting to go off of it since it’s pretty consistently dark but often interesting, and the balance was getting lost. It’s back. The premise is that in this world there are people with special powers that often have something to do with the real literary individual they are named for. The main group of characters are a bunch of misfits who work at a detective agency, the Armed Detective Agency, and […]

Paladins, Clay Men and Bears, Oh My!

Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel Book 2) by T. Kingfisher

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  What do you get when you combine fantasy, a sort of murder mystery/horror and romance with a healthy dash of humour? Why you get the latest book by T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Strength.  In the second book in the series, which continues in the same world as Paladin’s Grace, the lay sister Clara and Paladin Istvhan solve a growing horrific problem in headless bodies and murderous clay golems while realising they might actually have feelings for each other. Istvhan is from the same order of […]

On being alone and loving it, but also loving people

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Piranesi lives in a house with many halls, with an Ocean trapped within. There are infinite statues, and birds and fish, and the remains of 13 people who had previously lived there. He lives in isolation save for the Other, who named him and spends one hour, twice a week with him, to talk of his scientific observations. The House is the only place Piransi knows, and he has lived there from the beginning of time. But the arrival of 16, as in the 16th […]

Diving into a complicated re-read

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by Nameless

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It’s really hard to talk about Harry Potter without acknowledging the problematic things we know about the unnamed author now. Those of us who have committed ourselves to a lifetime pledge of eradicating bigotry are actively wrestling with whether or not we talk about a series that meant so much to us and was foundational, I would argue, in helping us make love and acceptance a core element of our moral values. My husband and I have decided to embark on a “Sacred Text” practice, […]

In many ways, this is every bit as important to speculative fiction as The Lord of the Rings

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Born in 1875, Edgar Rice Burroughs worked a number of odd jobs until, at the age of 35, he decided to pick up writing. Recalling in 1929 that, “if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten.” So, in 1911, he started writing what would go on to become A Princess of Mars, the first book in his Barsoom series. Shortly thereafter, he would go on to create Tarzan – […]



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