Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The earth has turned. The time is here. I am dying. Come and collect your inheritance.”

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova

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I tell you what, I’ve really been putting off writing this review. I just don’t want to try and put words to the subconscious magic this book can work upon a reader. And also the literal magic that is in the book. (An old woman turns into a tree! Flowers grow out of people’s bodies!) I’m really not going to talk much about the plot here because it’s way better to be surprised, but I will say that the book starts out with all of […]

I feel like I should have loved this book.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

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Well, this is an awkward review to write. I know that this book is widely beloved, but I just…didn’t love it. It was FINE! I wasn’t mad at it! But something about it failed to sufficiently warm the cockles of my cold, dead heart. This is my second T.J. Klune, and I didn’t love Under the Whispering Door, either. But people told me that I would like this one more. And I did, just not a lot more. I actually feel like if I had […]

Paul is a Blue Hippo and John is hanging upside down

Paul is Dead by Paola Baron

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Paul is Dead. How many Beatles fans know that story? Paul McCartney died at the height of Beatlemania and was replaced with a copy. And Paola Baron explores that idea in Paul is Dead, a speculation fiction graphic novel that causes questions of fame, reality, and self to have more questions than answers. I do not want to know what Baron or illustrator Ernesto Carbonetti were smoking when they created this realistically abstract, realistic-surrealism book, because John Lennon was not the only one having an […]

The City and the Pillar

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

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This is Gore Vidal’s third novel, first published in 1948. His first novel Williwaw was a solid success and is one of the very first WWII novels, even though the novel primarily takes place far away from the war. His second novel, In a Yellow Wood, was considerably less successful, perhaps as Vidal intimates in his introduction to this novel, for it not really reflecting what he wanted to write about. He also mentions that his grandfather, a former Senator, was perhaps grooming him to […]

Gateway to the Russian Novel

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

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Cbr14bingo New This is a new translation by Nicolas Paternak Slater and Maya Slater, and it is a novel about the clash of old and new ideas If you have been meaning to read one of the great Russian novels but are put off by the length of those written by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I’d like to suggest that you take a look at the works of Ivan Turgenev. A contemporary of those two illustrious writers and brilliant in his own right, Turgenev covers similar […]

Eat the Rich

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G Summers

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Look if you’re gonna credit Brett Easton Ellis in the acknowlegements, I better be able to tell what level of irony you are doing that on. A weird thing about this book is that there is no dramatic tension, deliberately so by construction. A Certain Hunger is the memoir of a self admitted psychopathic food critic who has murdered and eaten parts of several of her lovers over the course of her career, written from her jail cell. This leads to two things being the case […]



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