A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre
The problem, for me, when trying to finish a whole Cannonball, is that I read a lot of very long books that take me a long time to finish, and then I spend a week in a book coma, and then it’s July. So around August/September, I think oh shoot this is not going to work, and then I find a ton of random novellas so that I can reach my goal. The choice of these shorter books is based solely on feasibility (length). Sometimes […]
The Scar (New Crobuzon #2) by China Miéville
The Scar is the second of the New Crobuzon series by China Mieville, but you certainly don’t need to read the first (Perdido Street Station) to understand or enjoy the second. This is a long book with a lot going on! Let’s do a quick summary. Bellis Coldwine, our complicated protagonist, is a professional translator on a ship from New Crobuzon voluntarily going into exile after the events of Perdido Street Station. Her plans immediately collapse as she finds herself “press-ganged” by pirates onto a […]
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
Last week, on a road trip, I thought, “I am turning 43 on Monday and I have never read Proust” So I Googled “which Proust to start with” and the internet told me that Swann in Love is the place to start. This novella can stand alone, but it is actually a section of Swann’s Way, which in turn is the first volume of Proust’s famous In Search of Lost Time. The plot is pretty straightforward: Swann, a high society bougie fellow in fin-de-siecle Paris, […]
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix and I have an on-again off-again relationship. I didn’t like Horrorstor, but I appreciated the premise and the book itself in terms of the illustrations included. I enjoyed How to Sell a Haunted House enough that I decided to try The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and give him another chance. I will give him credit for being an author that I picked a random book from because of name recognition. So there’s that working in his favor. But we are […]
The Dawn of Yangchen by F. C. Yee
The Legacy of Yangchen by F. C. Yee
“Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “Everyone you meet in Bin-Er is in someone else’s pocket. From the moment you appeared, I was trying to figure out whose pocket you were in. Now I finally have the answer.” A fresh slash of a grin spread across her face. “Mine,” Avatar Yangchen declared. “Now you’re in mine.” Been a long week, so once again I’m skipping over the more weighty books in my rotation in order to indulge in the Avatar-verse. The Kyoshi books were a great way […]
A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic by J. Penner
Bingo 15 :White Notice the color of the title text? And few splashes of said color elsewhere? Ok then. However, if you want to be more creative about it, white is often represented as the absence of color, which could be argued to be a metaphor for the total absence of substance in this novel. So, there’s that too. Now to be absolutely clear, the absence of substance is exactly what I needed when I picked this up. I needed a palate cleasner from something […]
