Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The Joke’s On You

The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey

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For those who don’t know, Jack Handey is a humor writer most famous for his “Deep Thoughts” segments on Saturday Night Live, where he’d read out a short, absurd little humor piece over rolling nature footage. The segment was frequently hysterical, and a personal favorite of mine. I’ve been meaning to read Handey’s novel, The Stench of Honolulu, for a long time. I thought I knew what to expect. The narrator of the novel is a would-be adventurer invited to go on a trip to Hawaii […]

The gang’s all here!

The Late Mrs. Willoughby: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

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My local bookstore recently had a table full of Claudia Gray’s Jane Austen-based detective series on sale, so I picked up a couple, not realizing that I was starting with books 2 and 3. That’s a little bit of a shame, and I might circle back around to the first book eventually, but I still find this introduction to Gray’s series most entertaining. Gray has taken Austen’s best known and beloved characters from across several of her novels and created extended families for them, including […]

A Child of Social Media

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli

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Rating: 3.5 Stars In a nutshell: Former child social media darling Anuri (the correct markings on her name will not be accepted by my word processing program, but you can view the name and learn how to pronounce it here) has managed to mostly extract herself from her stepmother’s social media empire, but she is worried about the impact it is having on her 5-year-old sister’s life. Best for: Those interested in how social media affects children when they are the stars of it. Quote […]

One sister vs evil true crime podcast

House of Margins by Tloto Tsamaase

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House of Margins by Tloto Tsamaase is about Renewa trying to find out what happened to her sister, Anaya. Anaya was an up and coming Afrosurrealist writer from Botswana. As a finalist for the prestigious career-insuring Günter Prize, she goes to stay in the Günter Huis (it means house) to write a manuscript. Then she disappears. Renewa finds Anaya’s missing phone one day. It’s just on her bed. The phone has a true crime podcast about Anaya, and it gives Renewa access to episodes that […]

The Robot Who Cried ‘Wolf!’

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

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And so, I’ve finished the fifth level of my second trip to The Tower with Wolves of the Calla (which, incidentally, I have been mispronouncing in my head for over a decade and am still adjusting to the correct pronunciation, having now listened to the audiobook!). The main plot in this hefty tome is that our ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, reach one of the last towns, the Callas, of their world and make a final stand to protect the town’s […]

Infinite Shelf Life

A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen L Peck

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The irony that a story like this would be told in such a tight novella format is not lost on me, and it’s one of the many features that made me chuckle uncomfortably throughout. A Short Stay in Hell follows Soren, a recently deceased man who discovers, to his great misfortune, that he picked the wrong religion. He’s been a devout Mormon all his life (like the author himself), but it turns out the correct faith was actually Zoroastrianism. Tough luck, Soren. Fortunately, or perhaps […]



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