Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Cannonball Read After Dark: Surprise!

Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 7 by Rachel Kramer Bussel

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You can trust that Rachel Kramer Bussel is going to put together a good anthology. Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 7 is thoughtful with a wide range of stories. I don’t expect to like every story in an anthology, and erotica is tougher because it taps into a place that can be rawly personal. When Kramer Bussel puts an anthology together, I know I will at least appreciate most of the stories. My only complaint about the book is one I frequently have about […]

“In the clear and steady gleam of electric lights, superstition turns to foolishness; in the crucible of the combustion engine, false beliefs are burned away.” (Bingos #9 & 10)

Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite by Zoraida Cordova & Natalie Parker (editors)

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My Halloween read this year is this collection of new vampire tales edited by the team of Zoraida Cordova and Natalie Parker. I enjoy vampire stores because they offer so many different views onto the human condition, if you go looking for them. In Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite Cordova and Parker, along with the assembled authors, take the time to dig in and explore these angles – with postscripts by Cordova and Parker after each story. Let’s handle individual stories in […]

For the night is dark, and full of terrors

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Shelfie In five creepy stories ranging from the historical to more recent times, writer and artist Emily Carroll gives us her take on proper spine-tingling fairy tales. Accompanied by her absolutely beautiful art, the tales are all the more chilling because of the illustrations. This absolutely qualifies as a graphic novel, or probably more accurately a graphic short story (or fairy tale) anthology. Some of the stories are short, some are longer, all managed to truly unnerve me, while also entertaining […]

“well they’re all good dogs” …or stories

The Year's Best Science Fiction volume 2 by Jonathan Strahan

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I adore short story collections, and I was particularly impressed by last year’s anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. It follows the same format as last year, with the editor’s introduction including other recommended reading as well as general comments on the state of the publishing industry in 2020. And then we get into the real meat of it: 27 short stories that are, arguably, the best of the year. While some stories missed the mark a bit for me, they were all well-written and interesting. “well […]

An excellent spec fiction anthology

The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

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I absolutely adore speculative fiction anthologies, so when I saw that both C.L. Clark and T.L. Huchu had stories in this one, I had to read it. This is a collection of twenty-nine stories from 2020 told by African or African diaspora writers, a good mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror. There are stories that deal with age-old problems like racism and parenthood and newer ones like climate change and gentrification, from robot revolutions to vengeful djinn. Most of the stories were a solid […]

There was a game he could see and another he couldn’t, and he would play them both.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

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My formative King Arthur works were the 1963 Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I discovered Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, as a preteen, my life as a reader of fantasy and romance was set. I’m a King Arthur enthusiast, but not a purist (except for Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur – great cast, beautiful visuals, terrible movie that should never have been marketed as “historically accurate”). Hearing that a work is a retelling of […]



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