Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bloody fairy tales

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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As soon as I got an audience telling dark fairy tales online, people were recommending Angela Carter’s brilliant The Bloody Chamber to me. In fact, one follower loves it so much, they sent me a copy! Thank you to them. I really loved Carter’s literary take on popular fairy tales. Many short stories are direct twists on familiar tales (Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood) but others feel like original tales based on common motifs and characters (like “The Lady of the House of […]

Yo Ho Ho and Treasure

Danger in the Deep Sea (2) (OceanX Adventures) by Kate B. Jerome

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Kate B. Jerome has a series dealing with the OceanX expeditions, and book two is Danger in the Deep Sea (2) (OceanX Adventures). As an 8 to (young-medium) 12-year-old I would have devoured this book/series. I did not realize this was book two when I “picked up” the online reader copy. And while it can be a stand-alone read, it probably would have helped to read book one first. The adventures of the story are unbelievable, yet, probably plausible. Our main character is a treasure […]

Old friendships and older bones

Madame Badobedah and the Old Bones by Sophie Dahl

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Madame Badobedah and the Old Bones has great potential to be your child’s favorite story. The feel is as if Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking met My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. Sophie Dahl made a clever and interestingly classical feeling book. The story is sweet and funny as we follow a young girl who lives with her parents in the hotel they run, and is  friends with an elderly lady, Madame Boadobedah, who also lives there. The girl, Mable, is narrating […]

“READER, I RAN the f*** away.”

A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik

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CBR Bingo – Strange Worlds Our heroine Galadriel, aka El, a sort of magical Wednesday Adams, is fighting for her life at a teacher-less school of magic, only this Hogwarts is actively trying to kill its students. They attend classes, sleep in dorms, eat in a cafeteria, and are trapped there with no contact with the outside world as they make their way through this distorted high school experience. Everything is leading up to their graduation day, which tests the seniors’ mettle and skill and […]

“I’ll say it again, ideas are fragile things and sometimes it takes multiple people to pull a good one out of the ether. Just make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

Saga (Volume 10) by Brian K Vaughan

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CBR Bingo – Picture This Saga has always been a graphic roller coaster of emotion and violence wherein you’re laughing one minute, gasping the next, grimacing as you turn the page, and tearing up as you finish the volume. That said, the last issue was a coaster that ended with a straight drop into a splash pad of utter misery, leaving you stunned. Thus, it was hard to go on after volume 9 because of (MAJOR SPOILER REDACTED) but I felt I had dragged my […]

May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]



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