Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What Is “The Apocalypse” Anyway But Another Series of Bad Days, Or Same As It Ever Was, Or It’s Irrelevant

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson

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I can’t really explain it, but You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a near five star book. I rated it 4.5 stars on Storygraph and I’m not quite sure why I didn’t rate it a 5. I want to… there’s something… but I want to. But I won’t. Because there’s something on the tip of my tongue or on the cusp of catchable thoughts that maybe I can’t articulate. Or maybe I’m just that much of a hard ass. There are a few things […]

Epic fantasy inspired by the Pre-Columbian Americas

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

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CBR15 Bingo: On the Road – For two main characters about 80% of the book is them travelling. Bingo! The lands surrounding the Crescent Sea are ruled from the distant, northern city of Tova and the religious order of the Watchers.  The power of the Watchers has been waning and now that a commoner, Naranpa, has the highest role of Sun Priest there is dissent in the order and city.  Tova itself is broken into four districts each ruled by a different clan: Tsay (Golden […]

Pioneer Woman

Frontier Grit: The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women by Marianne Monson

The Paper Daughters of Chinatown by Heather B. Moore

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Frontier Grit – 3.5 stars In this book we meet twelve women who traversed the American frontier in search of their dreams, though what these dreams were and the paths they took to them vary extraordinarily. As a child I devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Though I’ve have quite a lot of bubbles burst about her depiction of her childhood (check out Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires to learn more), my interest in those so-called pioneers who tried to ‘tame’ the Wild West still persists, […]

A City on Mars

A City on Mars by Zach & Kelly Wienersmith

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If you don’t know what Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is, you’re missing out on one of the best and most enduring webcomics that isn’t XKCD. Both are hilarious, science and philosophy-based explorations of humanity’s weirdness by clever, curious people. Naturally, once I heard the Wienersmith’s were taking their brilliant, beautiful minds to look at space exploration, I signed right up. A City on Mars starts with a simple premise: every pop sci book on space exploration was written by an evangelist, and thus hand waves […]

The Keep

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

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The Keep is one of my favorite terrible movies. It’s legit bad, makes no sense, all vibes no brakes. In it, a group of German soldiers are tasked with guarding a Romanian pass which holds a strange keep. The keep is built backwards, with the biggest stones on the inside, as though it’s meant to hold something in, not out. Also the walls are peppered with crosses. What could go wrong! So naturally, someone picks at a cross, a demon comes out, and all hell […]

Weird casting, but OK.

The Mudlark by Theodore Bonnet

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So I didn’t expect this book to be what it was.  I knew it had been made into a movie back aways, with Irene Dunne as Queen Victoria (ahahaha!) and thought it was something along the lines of the Shirley Temple epic, The Little Princess, but it was definitely not that, and actually not at all a children’s book,. A definition first.  A mudlark was a child who earned his or her keep by scavenging through the “mud” on the banks of the Thames for […]



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