Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I can’t stop thinking about my lost pizza.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives (The Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1) by Hisashi Kashiwai

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I maintain that this premise is amazing, and it needs to exist in real life. The idea of food I will never taste again HAUNTS ME. I am not even being dramatic, I am being so real with you right now. (My #1 pick for this would be Pizza D’Amore’s piping hot square pizza slices, in the Paradise Valley Mall. AND I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE.) I will also admit that the premise hit me so strongly that I gave this book more stars than […]

“I wasn’t just going to abandon you, Carl,” Donut said. “Who do you think I am? Miss Beatrice?”

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

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Carl, Donut and Mongo have made it to the fourth level of the dungeon. This time, there are trains. So many trains. The game appears to have constructed a labyrinthine tangle of all of the world’s underground railway systems, and there are new and strange rules to get used to. There are bounties awarded to anyone who kills any of the players in the top ten, which now include both Carl and Donut. There are all manner of strange monsters on the various trains and […]

The Hand of Oberon

The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

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My decision to reread these novels as an adult continues to pay dividends. The Hand of Oberon covers a large amount of the origin of the Pattern, the levels of shadow and of Amber’s history that we have not yet seen from the view of our protagonists, and also some clarity on the imprisonment of Dworkin. If none of this makes sense, you haven’t been reading the books and that’s a shame. I’m phoning this review in to the nth degree because it’s Sunday and I’m […]

“It bears out a principal axiom of Borges’ philosophy as a writer: that language is by its abstract nature almost laughably reductive of the reality we use it to represent”

Ficciones by Jorge Borges

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Long ago–25 years I think–a past friend gifted me Jorge Borges’ Ficciones, a collection of short stories by the great Argentinian writer. My friend was a brilliant thinker and writer, and when I glanced at the book after he gave it to me, I thought it was suited to him but not to me. Like my last review of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, I was intimidated and didn’t feel smart enough to understand what probably came easy to my friend. So I put the book aside […]

Blood and Sand and Diamonds

The Burning Shore by Wilbur Smith

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When Centaine de Thiry is left destitute and pregnant after the death of her fiancé Michael Courtney during an aerial battle in World War One, she decides to make her way to Africa, where they had planned to live together after the war. This is the first book in this subsection of Wilbur Smith’s most long-running series, which follows the exploits of the Courtney family in South Africa. Like all the other books, it includes lots of adventure, drama, and some spectacular descriptions of the […]

Apple headed dolls and missing girls

The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan

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In addition to author events, the local independent bookstore hosts a few book clubs. When I moved here, the sessions were closed but I signed up for two of them when they opened for the spring. This was the first selection for the Southern Lit book club, which is also the one I am doing with my mom. Overall, it was a good book. Even though I like mysteries, this isn’t one I would have likely picked up on my own since I tend to […]



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