Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

P.D. James (1)

Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James

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“I found the yo-yo the day before Christmas Eve, in the way one does come across these long-forgotten relics of the past, while I was tidying up some of the unexamined papers which clutter my elderly life.” A late collection of stories by PD James in terms of publication, but a mélange of stories covering wide sections of her bibliography. I have read a handful of PD James novels, and I generally enjoy them. Her stories are also good, but I did find myself thinking […]

Brandon Sanderson (1); Mary Robinette Kowal (1)

The Original by Brandon Sanderson; Mary Robinette Kowal

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A novella co-written by Sanderson and Kowal, and with every co-written book like this, especially when I know both authors’ work to a certain degree, I spend a lot of time thinking about who must have written what. It’s not like a lot of Brandon Sanderson works, but it’s not quite what I know from Kowal. The novella is called “The Original” because we find ourselves in a future in which people can opt-in or out of certain technologies, including a cloning technology. Our narrator […]

“You want to know if they’re the mittens I wore to Biden’s inauguration. That’s all anyone wants to talk about these days: mittens, mittens, mittens.”

Feel the Bern by Andrew Shaffer

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CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries #1 When Crash, a new intern working for Bernie Sanders, accompanies her boss up to a small-town festival in Vermont, the last thing she expects is to discover a dead body – or that Bernie will insist on trying to solve the mystery. A few years ago I read Hope Never Dies, a comic mystery where Obama and Biden team up in the post-2016 election season to uncover the truth behind an Amtrak conductor’s death. Now Shaffer has […]

Do you like cozy mysteries? And small towns? And…MURDER?

Vinyl Resting Place by Olivia Blacke

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Olivia Blacke’s Vinyl Resting Place is the first book in The Record Shop Mysteries, and also my first ever “cozy” mystery. If they’re all like this, I’m in! In Vinyl Resting Place, Juniper Jessup is looking for something new. And maybe, something familiar. After getting laid off from her cool tech job in the Pacific Northwest, she sells her car and moves back to her little hometown in Central Texas. More specifically, she comes home to Cedar River. It’s a little but outside of Austin […]

Hairy Tail

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

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There’s something so simple and comforting at the heart of Fairy Tale. No psychological terror. No sexual assault. No prequels or lore.  No tween orgies. It’s the story of an old man, a boy, a dog, and an incredible adventure. And it was exactly the Stephen King book I needed at the closure of a hectic 2022. Fairy Tale opens with Charlie, a high school senior who has experienced the tragic loss of his mother, and the downwards spiral of his father. He has taken […]

“We were not liars, but but we made our own truths …”

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

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Agnes is in her late twenties, married to Earl and living in America in the 1960s, when she hears about the death of her childhood friend, Fabienne. It’s mentioned, almost in passing, in a letter from her mother, who still lives in Saint Remy in France, the farm village where Agnes grew up. Upon hearing this news, Agnes reflects on her childhood with Fabienne, which is the main focus of the novel (not to mention Agnes’ life). As young girls coming of age in the […]



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