Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Anything could be cajoled into sense if he thought enough about it.”

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

by Leave a Comment

Moshfegh has a lock on a particular zeitgeist that I have identified, NYT-like–e.g., I have seen at least one other similar item, have decided two points make a trend, and am now on the hunt for more books that prove my point. The trend: bodily horror, especially related to starvation or atrophy of the human body, as a mechanism to reject Rousseau and vindicate Hobbes’ contention that life outside society would be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. In this case, by showing that even within […]

So glad I made it past the late 90s, I would’ve been an embarrassing ghost then.

Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

The Crime Brulee Bake Off by Rebecca Connolly

by Leave a Comment

You ever just start scrolling down your library’s “available now” page, even though you have eleventy-seventy thousand books in your TBR mountain? Yeah, me too. And that’s how I wandered into two pretty good, but out of my usual genre, cozy-ish mysteries that I came here to recommend. They’re both debut novels, and I read them on audio – They have the same narrator, Sophie Roberts, who did such a great job w/The Crime Brulee Bake Off, and that I clicked her name to see […]

I’m not sure we’re better off in this universe either…

The Power by Naomi Alderman

by 2 Comments

This is a story that Alderman describes as feminist science fiction – a type of speculative fiction that I like to call a “what-if” story. The Power examines how power comes in various forms – whether physical, societal, something you are born into, something you can take from someone…and the list goes on. Alderman explores what happens when women develop an organ called a skein that enables them to deliver electrical shocks. Their inherent ability to physically overcome any man changes the balance of power […]

The Call of Cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecract, Gou Tanabe, Zack Davisson

by Leave a Comment

The Call of Cthulhu manga… you know it’s a real shame that Lovecraft was such a fucking racist, because otherwise this would be a great book to recommend to people. It perfectly captures cosmic horror, with Lovecraft’s themes about mankind’s miserable scope of existence on full display, but does so with a more personal and close scope than any other Lovecraft except perhaps the Dunwich Horror. In Cthulhu, Lovecraft has people fight back. What’s more, mankind even triumphs for a short period of time. Our […]

Triptych by Slaughter? I hardly know her

Triptych by Karin Slaughter

by 1 Comment

On a Mystery novel kick. This book was recommended by a coworker, and they did not disappoint. Triptych by Karin Slaughter is a solid, well written, book. That’s the headline.Spoilers ahead. This book actually took me for a ride, as it utilizes something I don’t really see in mystery novels very often, which is telling the story from multiple view points. But then it does a second unique thing, which is, not let you in on the full thoughts of the first person view. This […]

Rashoman Mystery but better

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

by 1 Comment

After my last few books, I wanted to read a mystery. A nice amouse bouche, a pallete cleanser for my literary pallete. And boy this did not disappoint. The basic premise of this book is, we are following the MC, as they experience the day through the lens of 7 (+0.5) different people. There is no trick to it. It is, for a lack of a better word, magic. He lives the other people’s life via magic. The two twists are as follows. 1, the […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo