Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


More Than a Female James Bond

The Night of Morningstar by Peter O'Donnell

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This is a recreational reread for me. I love the pulp novels of Peter O’Donnell and his exciting secret agent, Modesty Blaise, and reread the 13 novels every couple years. Modesty, in this novel, works with her equally competent partner, Willie Garvin, to combat a worldwide organization attempting to take over the world. In the other books, her beginnings as the head of a European crime syndicate is mentioned, but in this story, we watch her early retirement as she and Willie have decided crime […]

I Should Reread These Modesty Blaise Books in Order

A Taste for Death by Peter O'Donnell

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I enjoy rereading all the Modesty Blaise novels, but two of the characters who fall in love in this book were an old married couple in the last one. While the exploits of Modesty and her partner, Willie Garvin, are exciting, this has one of the best fight scenes in all the Modesty novels. In fact, she has a scary encounter with a swordsman AND Willie meets up with a gorilla-like sadist who had battered him almost to the death during a previous encounter. Stuck […]

A Flying, Glow-in-the-Dark Dinosaur in the Modern Day

Umboi Island by JJ Dupuis

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Laura is the host of Creature X, a cryptozoology show, despite being an avowed skeptic. In search of the Ropen, she and her team go to a remote island in Papua New Guinea, where they become entangled in a mystery when a dead man is found in one of their tents. Though billed a mystery, this is more of a good old-fashioned action-adventure novel, complete with martial arts, gun fights, and a far-off setting. What sets this book above many other old-fashioned action-adventure novel is […]

A Childhood Favorite Becomes a Complicated Re-Read As An Adult.

Tintin Volumes 3-23 by Hergé

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This is another review where I’m unable to be unbiased because these are the ultimate nostalgia reads for me. I read these obsessively until the covers fell off when I was little. It had been a long time (15 years +) since I’d revisited them, so I asked for the complete set for Christmas to round out my library. I got the full-sized albums, not the ones where they jammed four volumes into half-sized books. Hergé’s art is worth reading at full size so you […]

A trope to get rid of and maybe some more worldbuilding to add

Burn the Witch vol. 1 by Tite Kubo

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I already knew the story going into Burn the Witch (vol.1); the graphic novel is an adaptation of a limited episode series, and they match pretty closely. What I don’t quite get is the title; there aren’t really any witches. There are people with special powers but it’s not really magic exactly in that there is no real system explained and those who are licensed aren’t vilified. The concept is partially familiar: there is a mirror world to our own in which dragons are real, […]

Back the beginning in the underworld

Yuyu Hakusho vol 1 by Yoshihiro Togashi

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Bingo 10 Old Series Before getting to the review a little context: late 2006 or early 2007 I picked up a copy of Shonen Jump magazine (back when it still existed as a print thing one could buy in the grocery store), and eventually I bought it, and then subscribed. One of the series currently running around that time was Yuyu Hakusho; it was about ¾ of the way complete, and I read through the end of the serial publication of this series. I don’t […]



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