Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Masterful interweaving of past and present storylines to tell a slice of demon Kai’s life.

Witch King by Martha Wells

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CBR15 Bingo: Violence – “Kai looked at her through the black film of the veil, “You could say ‘be violent’ instead.”  Tahren, who Kai was beginning to suspect had a very dry sense of humor, patted his shoulder and said, “Be violent.”  Also, the Hierarchs are bent on committing genocide on a continent wide scale. Up to this point, my only exposure to Martha Wells was through The Murderbot Diaries.  I instantly fell in love with Murderbot and Well’s excellent writing.  I admire how she […]

A Small Southern Town with a Large Helping of Sex, Murder and Violence. Fun!

My Darkest Prayer by S.A. Cosby

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After a summer of serious reads it was fun to sit down and enjoy a good noir mystery, this one taking place in a small town in Virginia. It checks all the noir boxes: a woman with a checkered present, shady accomplices, dive bars, crime bosses and church ladies. Nathan returned to Virginia after a couple of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, he also used to work for the sheriff’s office. He now works for his cousin who is a mortician, Nathan transports the bodies. […]

Not for me.

The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang

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This one keeps souring in my mind the longer I’m away from it. The problem here is that I do not find stories about flighty people escaping from their responsibilities and the people counting on them–whether or not it was “their fault”–inherently interesting. In fact, I kind of hate them. Maybe other people get more kicks out of exploring their shitty unconnected left behind relationships with parental figures, but I find the whole thing unpleasant and not rewarding in any way. The one thing I […]

More than just Lady Edison

Beulah Has a Hunch!: Inside the Colorful Mind of master Inventor Beulah Louise Henry by Katie Mazeika

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October 2023 is biography reading time. Or at least it was for me, especially online. Therefore, another online reader copy I found that was also a biography of someone I was unaware of, was Beulah Has a Hunch!: Inside the Colorful Mind of master Inventor Beulah Louise Henry. And this gal had a lot of hunches! She figured out issues that others did not see as issues, or felt it could not be done, or might have been specific to say women. But she would even […]

Ode to books

Ode to a Bad Day  by Chelsea Lin Wallace

Odd Couples: A Guide to Unlikely Animal Pairs  by Maria Birmingham

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I love doing book review roundups. They are a way to get a couple reviews done at once and since they are short I am not writing a lot of “nonsense” to make any word quotas (selfish I know, but use the advantages I have).   Recently I found two books that are not alike in any traditional way (this is important to book two) but in a special way for me, which is the question: What do Ode to a Bad Day and Odd Couples have in common? Answer: They are both books […]

The wild world of ramen, fireworks and gunpowder

The Asian Hall of Fame: The Discovery of Ramen by Phil Amara and Oliver Chin

The Asian Hall of Fame: The Discovery of Fireworks and Gunpowder by Phil Amara and Oliver Chin

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The curiosity was great within me and I had to find the other Phil Amara and Oliver Chin titles other than the chess one in The Asian Hall of Fame series. Therefore, I filled out my trusty interlibrary loan forms and found a library that could grant me my wish. And because of that, The Discovery of Ramen and The Discovery of Fireworks and Gunpowder are now checked off my TBR. These are picture books on two very different subjects, but both equally historical making. Probably most people have seen a fireworks show, know […]



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