Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Lydia Millet (3)

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

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“His first idol was Andrew Jackson.” I managed to mess this one up pretty good. I started reading Lydia Millet books a few years ago, and when her new story collection Fight No More came out, I grabbed a few more off the shelf. I ended up reading Magnificence, which was one of the newer novels, and found it compelling but a little confusing. Then later I read Ghostlights, and found it both the same, and also oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place why exactly. […]

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1)

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

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“The day began at five to seven when the alarm clock (given to Phyllis by her mother when she started service) went off on and on and on until she quenched it.” This is book one of a five book series that was first published beginning in the late 1980s and then through about 2011 before Elizabeth Jane Howard died a few years ago. She was probably more famous during her lifetime than she is now, and more people should get to know her, because […]

The Deep

The Deep by Nick Cutter

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The dog dies. Horribly. It will make you sad. I checked online to see if the dog died as soon as I read there was a dog, because that’s just something you need to check for with horror stories. I kept reading, hoping the story payoff would be worth it. It was not. I love horror stories, it’s definitely my favorite genre. I have a pretty high tolerance for gore and horrible things happening to people, though I draw the line at like, the insane […]

Margaret Weis (1)

The Soulforge by Margaret Weis

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“He never wore his white robes while traveling.” Yesterday in class one of my students was teasing his friend who was telling me about a YA Fantasy series he was reading. He was only laughing (in a mostly good-natured way) at how silly any series sounds when you’re the one to describe it, especially to someone who’s not very interested in fantasy novels. In order to deflect, or more so absorb the laughing before anyone’s feelings were hurt I said: “If you promise not to […]

Space Opera

Space Opera by Cat Valente

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I heard about Cat Valente many times from my wife, a fan, but she entered my own scope through a post about how the internet has changed, and how that change has been for the worse as we repeatedly jump from social media platform to platform as each one is invariably purchased by a prick or overwhelmed by trolls. It spoke to me, both as a software developer who has just barely more insight into the health of the web than the average person on […]

The Liminal Zone

The Liminal Zone by Junji Ito

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The first Junji Ito collection I read was the only collection my library had, at the time: Fragments of Horror. It definitely had enough of the style to turn me into a fan, but it also had some absolutely bizarre stuff that didn’t translate across cultures well, such as the story about a reclusive writer with a lot of “habits” that turned out to be bizarre social quirks, which to my ignorant eye may have been of more significance in the social conservatism of Japan. […]



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