Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

‘Tis the Season

Batman The Long Halloween: the Prequel Haunted Knight by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

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I happened to see this at our local library as part of a Halloween Readings display. A long long time ago, I read a whole lotta Batman, including Loeb’s Hush, which I recall thinking was very good. Hush was drawn by the brilliant Jim Lee, which made the reading all the more interesting. There was a time when I read DC graphic novels regularly, but I got kind of tired of it and found other reading more to my liking. While this “prequel” to The […]

Bingo was his name-o

Age of Assassins by R. J. Barker

Blood of Assassins by R. J. Barker

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  CBR Bingo: Borrowed (Age of Assassins—I picked up both of these books at a little free library, so I’m counting it) CBR Bingo: ‘B’ (Blood of Assassins) These two books should complete my first bingo card (yay!)   I’ve been meaning to read RJ Barker’s works for a while now but somehow have just never gotten around to it. His Tide Child trilogy has been recommended to me by multiple people, and it sounds like something I would like, but I ended up picking up his debut trilogy, […]

A punch in the gut, but make it literary

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

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I expected this book to be about sexuality and Paris, in the way perhaps that A Moveable Feast is, or any of the other million Paris-based love stories. Honestly, I should have known better.  It is kind of about sexuality!  But it’s also about so many other things that by the end of the book I had stopped thinking about it as a love story at all. On the second page or so, we already know that our protagonist, David, is in Paris, but about […]

Middle-Aged McGee

A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. Macdonald

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The thirteenth novel in the series finds “salvage consultant” Travis McGee in a more contemplative frame of mind than usual. He’s been spending time with a beautiful widow of considerable means and she seems intent on making Trav husband #2. Remarkably, he finds himself at least a little drawn to the idea. McGee’s mind is changed when a man comes to see him and accuses McGee of sleeping with his wife. Travis doesn’t sense the danger until it’s almost too late, narrowly avoiding the hail […]

Believe the hype

James: A Novel by Percival Everett

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Cbr17bingo TBR (2 bingos) James won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. For some people, “literary fiction,” especially the prize-winning kind, can be intimidating and/or off-putting, but this novel is engaging, exciting and horrifying from page one. James is Percival Everett’s imaging of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his adventure down the Mississippi River, gets separated from him, and is reunited with him again near the end. Everett imagines […]

Djinn. Ghuls. Sorcerers. Never had to worry about this in my grandfather’s day.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

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A Dead Djinn in Cairo CBR 17 Bingo: Border This refers to the border between the earthly plane and what lies beyond. *cracks knuckles* Here we go. I’ve been procrastinating on writing book reviews because it’s always more appealing to just start a new book than to sit down and summarize the book I either devoured or endured. With the ones I devoured, I doubt whether or not I can be objective since I was so into it when I was reading and still felt […]



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