Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

can a fiction book about the historical racial terrorism be funny actually yes

The Trees by Percival Everett

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CW: lots of gore and descriptions of historical lynchings Percival Everett is another one of those incredibly prolific authors, and I’m frankly a bit embarrassed by how few of his works I’ve read. Given that this is the second one that I’ve enjoyed, I think I’ll turn to his back catalogue whenever I’ve got a bit of a gap to fill. I was under the impression that this book was about murderous trees, specifically that the trees used to lynch Black people (the book focuses […]

what a delightfully strange little book that I’m glad I picked up in a book swap

Little by Edward Carey

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What a genuinely weird little book, one I think I got as a gift from Caitlin The Beloved Book Group Dictator during year-end book swap. It really skims the edge of historical fiction but in the best of ways–as in, it is based on the person but doesn’t try in any way to give you a full and thorough accounting of what their life was like, and is all the better for it (looking at you, The Personal Librarian) (now that I think about it, that […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia does noir as well as you think she would – brilliantly

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno Garcia

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Ulises Linares (not his real name) is a conman who engages in lonely hearts and romance cons. At almost 30, and after the death of his father, he’s feeling a pressure to pull a con that will give him some stability. He decides to pursue Perla Inclan, a woman whose family once owned a reasonably successful coffee company in Puerco Ahogado (which means “drowned pig”), in the mountains of Veracruz. But Perla is no easy mark. And her niece, Inés, clocks him pretty quickly. The […]

and now for something different and a bit infuriating

Ungodly Rich by Katharine McGee

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I liked this book but also it’s infuriating and I cannot in good conscience give it a higher rating. I mean, I did stay up late finishing it, and kept reading it in small snippets while out getting dinner (e.g., while waiting for my friend to go to the bathroom) so it’s definitely readable in that sort of omg I can’t put it down sort of way. It’s almost as if it’s got a desire compulsion built into it, so that everyone has to finish… […]

TL;DR: Everybody Needs Therapy

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

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Either of these books could count for the Justice square, but I’m putting Ballad on “Justice,” and Sunrise on “And,” because it’s the second of the prequels. I didn’t read these books when they were first released because The Hunger Games was the perfect trilogy, and it shattered me so hard I didn’t want to go back into that world. Especially after 2016 and….*gestures broadly at everything* One of my co-workers, however, insisted that I really needed to read them. If you’re a librarian, and […]

All Hail Dark Lord Davi

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

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In How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, we meet one Davi Morrigan; Ms. Skulltaker, if you’re nasty. Davi is stuck in a time loop in a land with no name, where she appears to have been teleported (maybe?) from America (probably). Davi has lived two hundred and eighty-some lives over a thousand years, trying (and failing) to defeat The Dark Lord and his army of wilders. And she is tired of it. Tired of getting killed in all the possible ways someone […]



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