Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The stories in this anthology trust their worlds and characters completely, and because we can sense the author’s confidence, we are willing to trust them in return.”

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 by Edited by R.F. Kuang

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This is always one of the highlights of my reading year; I do love a SF/F collection and the contemporary field really clicks with me (more than those 1960s/1970s collections I keep subjecting myself to). John Joseph Adams does a great job setting this up, reviewing all the stories of the year (a gargantuan task), and providing the series editor with 80 stories to choose from. I like seeing what the year’s editor has to say and what picks they make. Having a different editor […]

Nevertheless, they persisted

Bright Young Women: A Novel by Jessica Knoll

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From Harper’s Bazaar, Best Books of 2023: Don’t miss this “breakneck thriller based on Ted Bundy’s heinous crimes [following] two women with connections to the murders and their search for justice…a sharp examination of our culture’s obsession with serial killers and true crime” I was unaware while reading Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women: A Novel that the story was inspired by Ted Bundy’s murders of two sorority girls at Florida State University in 1978. The novel recounts the events and more importantly the aftermath of […]

“I’ve had my eyes taken from me twenty-three hours a day. The one hour I’m out of the hole is the worst of them all. I spend the fifty-nine minutes afraid to go back in.”

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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This book y’all. This. Book. THIS. BOOK. This one is in my top 5 for the year, easy; it’s an early contender for #1. I knew going into it that it was going to be a bumpy ride, having been warned by a few reader friends that it was intense, hard-to-read, and “the ending left me stunned, mouth opened, for five whole minutes.” And still, I was not prepared for Adjei-Brenyah’s literal and metaphorical jaw-dropping book. A few chapters in I asked said friends, “Ummm. […]

“It wasn’t what I expected when I first met her…but it turns out that Nada’s not that different from my other friends.”

Satoko and Nada Vol. 1 by Yupechika

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This was a random find at Barnes and Noble, and since it was marked down to $7 and I used my $5 rewards, I technically got it for $2. A real deal thanks to the Book Annex discount the store does. Probably due to this title not selling well enough for them to discount it, they only had volume 1 and 3, so I only got volume 1. While I did like it, I don’t think I liked it enough to track down volume 2. […]

“I trust you to love the shit out of my boy, and not hurt his shitty little heart. I know it will be messy because, yeah.”

Taste: London Love Book Two by Sophia Soames

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Just like that, I was exposed and helpless and being blown apart by the man I apparently couldn’t resist. The man I disliked to the point of not doing my job properly. ― Sophia Soames, Taste Finn is the rule-following, hardass hotel manager of the Clouds Westminster Hotel. He is good at his job and expects nothing less than perfection from himself or the rest of his staff. Mark Quinton is the new head of food and beverage at the hotel, and he is everything […]

“We shall be useful. But just as importantly we shall be defiant, occasionally ill-mannered, and completely indomitable.”

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman

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The historical detail of this book was incredibly pleasing (the afterword notes that she submitted 2/3 of it as her dissertation for her PhD!) and I am definitely in for reading more from this series. My favorite thing from this author that I’ve read by quite a large margin. I was pretty sure going in that this was a romance, because of the cover and the ladies in dresses, but like the cover (which hides its weapons amidst the folds of a dress) this book […]



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