Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Stockholm Syndrome

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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A hapless robber tries to stick up a cashless bank (which is apparently very much a thing in Sweden) and winds up holding eight people hostage at a nearby apartment viewing instead. In parallel narratives, Backman tracks both the robber’s pathetic attempt to corral the hostages, and the similarly ineffective police investigation conducted in the aftermath of the incident. The hostages, remarkably, are equally uncooperative in both scenarios. They consist of an older married couple who’ve taken to buying and flipping properties in their retirement, […]

Is shooting someone in the arm art?

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

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I’ve read Nothing to See Hear by Kevin Wilson, and really liked the creativity and tone of the novel. So, when my book club chose The Family Fang (2011) by Wilson, I was excited for more of the same. Although this book was still unique and creative, I did not like it as much as Nothing to See Hear. We did have a good discussion at my book club, and I learned a bit about some of the history of performance art. However, I never felt as connected or sympathetic […]

Lying For Money

Lying For Money by Dan Davies

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Lying for Money is a comprehensive high-level look at financial fraud. You learn about everything from the early colonial fraudsters of the Mosquito Coast up to and including crypto and the Housing Market Collapse of 2008. The author is a financial writer who’s covered the field extensively and is only a _little_ insufferably smug. Overall I don’t really know what to say about this book. I heard about it in the context of crypto fraud, and that section is glancing but fairly complete. It covers […]

So you married a werewolf …(or baby now we maybe got bad blood)

Bride by Ali Hazelwood

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I will admit when I first heard that this book was a thing, I was a bit of a hater about it.  I went “It’s a vampyre and werewolf romance and the vampyre’s name is Misery … oh here we go.”  Then I heard it had alpha/beta/omega tropes that I was familiar with from fanfiction and I maybe eye-rolled a bit.  Because I was being judgey (to be clear I read fanfic, and I love a lot of fanfic, I just personally tend not to […]

Erasure/American Fiction

Erasure: A Novel by Percival Everett

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I heard good things about the movie version of this book (American Fiction), but since I haven’t been able to see it, I decided to just go to the source. This 2001 novel, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, is short but punchy and full of literary references that I could probably spend years investigating. It’s a riveting story but one of those novels that I know I am only partly understanding. Everett includes an incendiary novel within his novel, and exposes the many forms erasure takes. […]

Oh Lois, you hold my heart so gently.

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

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So, you pick up a science fiction mystery novel by your favorite author. You know the one, who wrote your favorite character of all time? It’s another in her long, award winning series following Miles Naismith Vorkosigan through his life of adventure and mystery. (if you’ve read Bujold, you know why you never leave out Naismith in his name.) The soletta – the key to terraforming Komarr – has just been hit and almost catastrophically damaged by an ore freighter. Miles is a newly minted Imperial […]



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