Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sequel to Furthermore

Whichwood by Tahereh Mafi

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Whichwood by Tahereh Mafi is the sequel to a fantasy book Furthermore, which I reviewed earlier. To recap,  Furthermore is a fantasy book for ages 9-12. Set in a magical place called Ferenwood, Furthermore follows 12-year-old Alice Alexis Queensmeadow a girl deprived of love, care, and color. It is Ferenwood tradition for all 12-year-olds to “surrender” their magical talent. Based on their magical talent, they will be assigned a task. Whichwood does involve Alice and Oliver, the main characters from Furthermore, but the main character […]

Whose history?

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

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I picked this book up because it was on a list of “perfect short novels” mentioned in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. There are always so many new books coming out that excite me, so it can be tough to add anything to my TBR pile that isn’t contemporary. I have really been loving books written by poets lately, and really wanting something short to balance out the longer books I’ve been reading. This should have fit right in, but ultimately this wasn’t a book for […]

A life less ordinary

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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I was very interested in reading this book from the moment I heard about it. It was getting some really great reviews, and the topic was of high interest for me – as it is for all humans, in some way or another. The title refers to the average lifespan of a modern human – we have roughly 4,000 weeks to be alive, so to borrow a trite phase, how do we make the most of it? I’ve used up about half of that, and […]

Burn it all

Fail State by John Birmingham

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This short book follows a few groups of survivors as they struggle for life and liberty following the ‘Day Zero’ event that has taken down North America. I think John Birmingham is an Aussie writer who just really really loves destroying the USA. I swear every novel of his that I have read finds a new and awful way to take down the states. Fail State (which I now see is actually #2 in his ‘End Of Days’ trilogy) continues this theme in fairly predictable […]

Behind the Veil of Perfection

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

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This is a book that’s going to stay with me for a while.  In Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker details the story of the Galvins: A family of twelve children, made up of 10 boys and two younger girls. And in the first part of the book, we learn how six of those 10 boys, six went on to develop a form of schizophrenia.  The eldest of these boys, Don Jr, was born at the closing of WW2. An average student but a rather enthusiastic […]

Aerin-sol, Dragon-Killer

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

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In Damar once there was a princess called Aerin who was pitifully out of place, for she was the daughter of a woman who had long been branded a witch. With a vague sense that her destiny lay elsewhere compared to where a princess’s destiny generally lies, she set out to become the best dragon slayer the realm had seen, no matter that killing dragons was a thankless and ignoble task. But it turns out her destiny was far greater than that. I remember I […]



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