Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And to think, when I was her age, I was learning to ride a bike

My Name is Bana by Bana Alabed

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My Name is Bana is not a memoir, but it is the story of Bana Alabed. She was a young girl who saw that things were not right in her war-torn homeland of Syria. And she stood up and did what modern kids did. She Tweeted. This is not that story. This is a story about Bana and how she is as strong as the tree she is named for. Bana’s mother tells her how the Bana tree grows strong. And how it is strong […]

Fallen highly advanced civilization, tech magic vs. bio magic, and two siblings on opposite sides of the divide.

Ashes of the Sun: Burningblade & Silvereye Book One by Django Wexler

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More than 400 years ago there were two powerful entities, the Chosen and those who are now called ghouls.  The Chosen wielded a magical power called deiat.  With deiat they powered technological marvels like sky fortresses and more mundane blaster pistols.  The ghouls channeled a biological magic called dhak.  With dhak they could do amazing feats of healing and creation of bio constructs for any application.  Dhak could also be twisted to create horrible monsters, plaguespawn, as creatures and humans could be hybridized.  400 hundreds […]

I still like the characters, but the situations are getting harder to believe

A Different Dawn (Nina Guerrera #2) by Isabella Maldonado

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So in the first Nina Guerrera book, a serial killer was after Nina to finish the job he started years ago when he kidnapped her as a teen.  In this book, she’s also related to the mystery.  I don’t want to spoil it, because it is interesting.  It’s just getting hard to believe that EVERY SERIAL KILLER is obsessed with her. Again Ms. Maldonado has come up with an interesting premise.  Families that just recently brought home a baby girl from the hospital are being […]

OK I may have over-estimated Odd Thomas filling the Bosch void in my life

Forever Odd (Odd Thomas #2) by Dean Koontz

Brother Odd (Odd Thomas #3) by Dean Koontz

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I had a great reaction to the first Odd Thomas book.  I did not love this book.  By the end of the book I was listening to the audiobook at like 1.6x.  This is pretty fast.  I basically hated it and wanted it to be over! At the start of this book Odd is awoken by his recently dead neighbor, who is a doctor with a stepson Odd’s age.  The son is missing, and the rest of the book is basically Odd trying to find […]

A cool collaboration of thriller writers and characters

Face Off by David Baldacci

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This is the second collaboration audiobook I’ve borrowed and read from my library.  I got into it because of my buddy Michael Connelly.  If you read my previous review that I just posted, you’ll know that maybe he’s not my buddy after all, but Harry Bosch is.  Conveniently, Harry is in this book! The wording on Goodreads calls this “an unprecedented collaboration”, which sounds very grand.  I didn’t really get it until I looked at all the authors involved and listened to the intro.  Apparently […]

Nocturnes

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

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This is a relatively short, short collection by Kazuo Ishiguro, that was published in 2009. I think this is his only collection, and perhaps he never really wrote short stories otherwise. The stories are linked thematically, but in some cases with overlapping elements. The thematic elements appear in the title and subtitle: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, and a nocturne is a song related to or inspired by night. Oddly though, I would say not all of these stories are about night? Anyway, the […]



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