Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There is a great difference between fearing death, which you don’t seem to, and not wanting to die.

Debts of Fire by Intisar Khanani

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I highly recommend the Sunbolt Chronicles series. Intisar Khanani writes complex and engaging stories with resourceful girls at the center. At the start of the series, a fortune teller tells Hitomi to run, and so she has been ever since. In Debts of Fire, Hitomi is still running, but is starting to think about how to live her life beyond that, if she survives. Hitomi does dangerous things because they need to be done. Things are more fraught after Memories of Ash – her magic […]

Interesting elements but a little disappointing

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto

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Cbr17bingo “I” Published in Japan in 1961, Inspector Imanishi Investigates opens with the battered, bloodied body of an unidentified 50-year-old man found on the train tracks in Tokyo. Those who had seen him earlier in the evening with another younger man indicated that both men spoke with an unusual Japanese accent. As Inspector Imanishi investigates, more unusual deaths follow amongst the very people he wanted to question. While the coroner rules those deaths natural or simply unfortunate, they seem suspicious to Imanishi. As the months […]

“Its so easy, isn’t it, to decide the people you’re fighting aren’t really human.”

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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I am counting this book for the Citizen category in the CBR17 Bingo Reading Challenge. The central antagonist of this novel is an empire known as the Radch. The inhabitants of the Radch are known as Radchaii, which translates to either “civilized” or “citizen.” The Radch is benevolent and giving to its citizens, but brutal and violent to outsiders. One of the central themes of the books centers on how people justify atrocities by dehumanizing those they hurt, and how the concept of “citizens” or “civilized […]

Childe Roland to the dark tower came

The Dark Tower I: The Gungslinger by Stephen King

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After decades, I’ve decided to make my second pilgrimage to the Tower. The Gunslinger is the first in King’s most ambitious series, where his sprawling, multiversal, interconnected worlds are tied together.  Any Constant Reader worth their salt has made the trip to the Tower at least once. So as I stared down the final few weeks of my marathon training, I decided that I wanted my companion on the long, slow training runs to be Roland. In the world of the Dark Tower, “the man […]

Whisper Sweet Nothings About Chopin All Day Long

The Unforgivable and Other Writings by Cristina Campo

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This collection of short stories was the product of an unusual author.  Campo, born in Italy in 1923, had been a sickly child (heart condition) and grew up secluded by her wealthy family in a villa in Tuscany.  In the 1960s, she moved to Rome, and lived in a convent for long periods of time until her untimely death in 1977. Some of her earlier work borders a little too closely to twee for my taste, and I do not share her enthusiasm for Catholic […]

I think I prefer her contemporaries

Manic Pixie Dream Earl by Jenny Holiday

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3.5 stars Thanks to Jenny Holiday, Netgalley and Tantor Audio for this ARC. My opinion is my own. Edward “Effie” Astley, Viscount Featherfinch, is a poet and a terrible disappointment to his father. Thankfully, he’s about to set off on the annual “Earl’s trip” with his two best friends, who support him come what may. So they don’t ask any questions when Effie asks them to help him store a broken printing press, nor why he’s so preoccupied with letters from a Miss Evans. Effie […]



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