Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

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I think I’ve found my favourite genre! It only took me 37 years (as of today)! Dark Tales is a collection of dark short stories by Shirley Jackson. They range from biting yet realistic dissections of suburban life to classic ghost stories and fever-dream-like tales with loose endings frayed as cut ribbons. My favourite stories were ‘Paranoia’, in which an ordinary businessman is hunted through the big city by mysterious figures, and ‘What a Thought’, in which a housewife experiences life- ending changing urges after […]

Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

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I’m fudging a little bit: this isn’t a book, it’s a short story. It’s an absolutely outstanding short story  however. It’s based on a story by Ursula K. LeGuin and expands on it in ways that made me want to go and read the original. Were I not locked joyfully within the Dungeon Crawler Carl universe so completely that I plan to start a reread the moment I finish book 7, I would. As it is I’ll have to wait. Why Don’t We Just Kill the […]

Dead Giveaway

The Dead Romantics by Ashely Poston

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Florence ‘Flo’ Day is a novelist with one not very successful novel to her name. She has been working as a ghost writer for a famous novelist, but since her grade a dickback boyfriend quite literally dumped her she can’t find her groove. Her super sexy new editor tells her to get her ass in gear, but she can’t – and then her beloved father dies, her world shatters, and she returns home to the town she fled when she was eighteen.  You see, Flo […]

Together we can be worth more than the sum of our parts

Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

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Sarai Johnson teaches writing and literature courses at Howard and American Universities in the DC Area, and apparently wrote Grown Women, her first novel, in her free time. In my free time I do things like sleep, or sit around and do nothing, or make lists of things I should be doing. Okay okay, I also read the product of other people’s free time. Which bring us full circle to Grown Women, a novel about four generations of women, with the story beginning in 1974 […]

The Man in the Arena

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

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The problems with Suzanne Collins’s latest attempt to wring more money out of The Hunger Games franchise start right from the get-go. Sunrise on the Reaping is a prequel to the original trilogy, and somewhat a sequel to the series’ fourth entry, The Battle of Songbirds and Snakes. It tells the story of Haymitch Abernathy, later Katniss Everdeen’s drunken, curmudgeonly mentor, as he attempts to survive the 50th Annual Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell. I should say, Haymitch tells the story, […]

A Wordless Comic Means No Fun Quote Review Title

A Sea of Love by Wilfred Lupano, Gregory Panaccione (illustrator)

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This is a book that only came to my attention because I had a Read Harder task to complete and nothing on my current 600+ Want to Read shelf on Goodreads had anything that fit the bill. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first wordless comic I’ve ever read as an adult.   This is the second book that I tried for this task, as the first ended up not actually being wordless and I returned it to the library (Google is […]



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