Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Book Lovers Guide

Book Love by Debbie Tung

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I probably cannot say enough good things about Book Love by Debbie Tung. Has the theme been done before? Yes, these are not new issues book lovers have had to deal with. However  they are just fun, everyday issues, loves, joys and heartbreaks of the reader. Each page makes them come alive in silly, cute, relatable black and white images. If you have ever considered yourself a Reader with a capital R,  this is the book you want to read when you need a break […]

Gruesomely delightful

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

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This is an unusual take of the slasher genre that I found refreshing. Is that an appropriate word to use when talking about slashers? Probably not, but I’m not sure what would work better…it was gruesomely delightful. How’s that? I can’t say it’s the first of its kind – the story reminds me of Scream, or even, to a lesser extent, Cabin in the Woods, where there was a comical self-awareness of the genre embedded in the story. I was a Teenage Slasher is narrated […]

Dementia makes mysteries even more complicated

One Puzzling Afternoon by Emily Crutchley

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This book follows what I find to be a common formula: an (arguably) unreliable narrator, and two different timelines: one in the 50s and the other in the 2010s. So we get bits and pieces of a mystery about a missing girl in alternating chapters. Our narrator is 82-year-old Edie (or 15 years old in the 1950’s time-line). As a child, Edie is an outcast. She’s poor and has an unusual home-life, as her mother performs seances. Edie meets Lucy, the mayor’s daughter, and they […]

An Early Work by Dostoevsky

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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If you’re interested in reading classic literature, this is a good one to start with. Clocking in at under 70 pages (as least according to my Kindle), this novella is told as the diary of an unnamed narrator recounting a few nights with a young woman in Petersburg. Our narrator meets Nastenka on a street one night after rescuing her from a man who was accosting her. He had previously observed her on the bank of a river and noticed her crying, but she ran […]

:A Review

Cahokia Jazz: A Novel by Francis Spufford

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I picked up this book entirely based on the strength of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty—a novel that’s hard to categorize, summarize, or explain. This is a little easier to place: it’s a 1920s crime noir detective mystery set in an alternate version of the US where the Native American population retained power due to a less virulent strain of smallpox brought by the colonizers. The result is three distinct regions: a version of the US we recognize, a southern area run by the KKK, and Cahokia—a […]

I should do a better job remembering where i get recs from

The Fetishist by Katherine Min

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I wish I could remember where I stumbled upon this—it has very strong NYT Book List vibes or maybe even a bit of that “Mythili trying to be pretentious” energy. Regardless, I found it to be an averagely enjoyable read. As a (South) Asian woman who has navigated dating and relationship spaces filled with various races, including white men, I was naturally drawn to the premise. There’s something especially intriguing about exploring these dynamics, particularly when I recall my own experience at a college with […]



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