Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Some big hits and major misses in an overall forgettable collection

Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane by Jonathan Oliver

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Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is an anthology of short stories centered around magic in all its various forms: ancient folk magic, new age witchcraft, stage magic, and even some techno-magic. There are 15 short stories in this collection, and, over all, this anthology is fine. Too often, the stories told are not short stories but rather truncated ones. For many of the stories, it feels as though the authors were limited by a page or word maximum […]

I wasn’t expecting such a serious book based on the title

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks

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Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre is the story of of a group of yuppies fighting for survival against a tribe of starving Sasquatch after Mount Rainier erupts. Most of the novel is told from the point of view of Kate, a new resident to the western Washington planned village of Greenloop. Kate and her husband, Dan, have been having marital troubles, in part because Dan can’t find a job. Kate is hoping the tech and creative community in Greenloop will inspire Dan and […]

My oh my: a little book with a big punch (Reader’s Choice)

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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HOLY GUACAMOLE THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. Like, so so good. I heard a lot of good things, but it was so little an unassuming it sat on my bookshelf for over a month, having snagged it from the library. The cover is intriguing, with its big bold green font, but I figured I’d get around to it. Well, one night about 20 minutes before I wanted to be asleep I figured eh, I’ll crack this one open. One hour and half of the book […]

The master at some of his best work (Belated Bingo – White Whale)

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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I’m a big fan of Stephen King. I’ve read many of the classics (Pet Sematary, The Shining, It, Misery, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter,  Needful Things) some of the zany ones (Christine and Rose Madder)  and I think my favorite, the most not-put-down-able for me, was The Stand. All that said I find him pretty uneven and sort of have to steel myself for his typical writing style. For folks that haven’t read any of his books, the way I describe it is that it is always […]

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad…House

It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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A knock at the door. A series of frantic knocks at the door. Yes, It Will Just Be Us  nearly starts with “it was a dark and stormy night”. Our narrator, Sam, is a down-and-out adjunct professor of archeology barely hanging onto her sanity. After a series of upsetting events, we find her moving back to her crumbling, ancestral mansion in on the edge of a foreboding Virginia swamp. The mansion is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. It’s haunted by the living specter of her […]

Two stories that couldn’t be more different

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

We Are All Monsters Here by Kelley Armstrong

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Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein (4 stars) What, exactly, is money? How does it work? Why does it work? How did it develop? What I’ve always assumed, and what I think most people who think about it assume, is that money evolved from early barter economies. Instead of selling, for instance, crops for money, early farmers would exchange crops for things that they needed. So a farmer would have to find, say, a potter and exchange a bushel of […]



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