Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Book with a Long Title but Not Much Depth

The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life by Usata Nonohara, Ox (illustrator), Guru Mizoguchi (manga)

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I don’t always agree with the reviewers in Otaku USA magazine in fact I often don’t, at least on some big point or another. This time however, they nailed it. I saw a review for The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life, which decided that this was unremarkable, but cute, more about the characters than the story. Then I was off on a business trip and had some time to spare on my way to the hotel and wandered into a […]

Mystery of the Book Smell

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I really enjoyed volume one of this series (The Accidental Alchemist), and I was looking forward to volume 2. The Masquerading Magician keeps up a lot of the things I liked about the first book, adds some good new stuff, but in the end loses some of the intrigue the novelty of the first book had. Two additions make this book almost as good as the first: Dorian’s backstory and Zoe’s fellow alchemist Tobias. The recurring subplot of trying to save Dorian from turning fully […]

Immortals, Gangsters, and Bootlegging but no Capone

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Baccano!: The Rolling Bootlegs is as the title suggests (‘baccano’ supposedly means ‘commotion’) a crazy story with a lot of characters and a lot of action. I have to admit, I’d seen the anime of this story already (I’m pretty sure there’s a manga too but I haven’t seen that), so I kind of knew who was who, but the novel version actually includes a lot of things that made more sense to me in this format, including the identity of the demon who provides […]

Time of the Living Gargoyles

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I picked this up as a light read and it is, but it’s entertaining. Zoe Faust, the heroine, is an herbalist and runs an online shop, who just wants to settle into her new fixer-upper home in Portland, Oregon. Zoe encounters a few problems. First, there is the living stone gargoyle Dorian Robert-Houdin who has stowed away in her things because he needs her help translating an old alchemical text in order to save his life. It turns out Zoe is several centuries old, having […]



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