Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Abstract idea in a concrete book

Enough Is… by Jessica Whipple

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Jessica Whipple’s text in Enough Is… not my usual read. I enjoyed it, but I am not “jumping up and down” over it. However, Nicole Wong’s illustrations were perfectly sweet and worth the time to read them. That is not to say Whipple’s text is not good, just not for me at the time of reading. This book is aimed at a modern reader with classic sensibilities. The idea is a good one with the theme of consumption and how it is flashy, and noisy […]

This mite is mighty

Roberto: The Insect Architect by Nina Laden

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Roberto: The Insect Architect is what you expect from a book about a termite who wants to be an architect. There are puns about eating your wood and not building with it. There are bug-name puns of real-life architects and more. It is simple enough, but Nina Laden has created a long story that mostly is amusing (it is mostly a Love or Not book, with a few people in the Like category). Landen’s illustrations are what you see from the cover, only a few […]

The short book with a long title and big idea

My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat by Sandol Stoddard Warburg

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My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat has a feeling of not being a contemporary story, but also has a contemporary theme. I believe this book was originally from the 1960s, but the idea of self-confidence, self-understanding and self-autonomy comes into play as we see in several of today’s stories. Sandol Stoddard Warburg (author) and Remy Charlip (illustrator) created a story about boundaries that a young boy learns from his cat. The cat of the story is a simple creature but has a […]

Hopefully it’s just series sophmore slump

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Potentially unpopular opinion ahead: I did not especially like Harrow the Ninth. I loved Gideon the Ninth, but I don’t think all the narrative experimenting and the pacing worked out well here. After Harrow becomes a Lyctor and Gideon is gone, about 85 percent of the Harrow the Ninth is confusion. The narrative switches between second and third person (there’s also some first person but that is mostly later) and neither voice really knows what’s going on; on the one hand, this makes sense because […]

The scorn is as high as an elephant’s eye…

1922 by Stephen King

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1922 is a novella by Stephen King. It centers around a small family trying to run a farm in Nebraska: Wilf, Arlette, and their child Henry (who prefers to go by Hank, pleaseandthankyou). The story is written through the eyes of Wilf, who is making an end-of-life confession about the events of the titular year. As he tells it, his wife Arlette owned 100 acres of pristine farming land adjoining the family lot, and she was hell bent on selling it to a slaughterhouse company. […]

Read ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ Instead

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

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Uggggghhhh. Sometimes I don’t know why I do it to myself, choosing books like this to read (or at least why I don’t quit when I’m not enjoying it). I think its that I always suspect the book is going to get better, especially ‘classic’ books, because otherwise why would someone still be putting it on some ‘100 books to read’ list (including a scratch off poster of important novels that I am very keen to scratch off entries on)?  Two years ago I read […]



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