Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Eat the Rich

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

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I did not have “give 5 stars to a horror book” on my BINGO card for this year, even if it is considered a “cozy” horror (a descriptor that I disagree with). But I really loved everything about this: the characters, the humor, the themes. The main character is Shesheshen, an amorphous goopy monster who is rudely awoken from hibernation when monster hunters enter her lair. She is injured while fleeing in a shapeshifted human form and rescued by Homily. Shesheshen realizes she needs to […]

A new favorite book that could not fit better into this BINGO square if it tried. CBRBINGO – Bananas

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

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This is a ridiculous book that I loved very much. Also, because I have low spoons at the moment and also because I couldn’t do better, here is the blurb: Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain […]

You okay?” “I think so.” A more accurate response would have been clinically alive but dead inside, but that probably wasn’t appropriate with strangers.

Skin and Bones: London Love Book Three by Sophia Soames

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Mark nodded. “And you should take Hugo. Get some sea air in his lungs. Get shat on by some seagulls.” “Bloody seagulls.” “Sandy beaches, open spaces. Who needs shit like that?” “Nobody,” I agreed. “Fucking nobody.” ― Sophia Soames, Skin and Bones The quote above is the only one I highlighted while reading. And it perfectly encapsulates why I adore Sophia Soames’s writing. This is the third Soames book I’ve read in the past six months, and the second one I have read this year. […]

CBR BINGO – On the Road: “. . . happiness comes not from bodily pleasures or wealth or power, but from living a life that’s right for your soul.”

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune

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This was very sweet and a little bit unhinged, which I of course always appreciate. This is actually a bit more in line with Klune’s self-published stuff, with darker themes and humor with a little more of an edge to it. I am REALLY curious to know what the original story in this book looked like; he’s vague in the end notes but apparently somebody told him the world wasn’t ready for it (????) and things were changed up pretty heavily. There are some light […]

“From that point of understanding, you begin to move on, no matter what.”

How to Be Ace by Rebecca Burgess

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This is another winner from Jessica Kingsley Publishers, which I’ve become increasingly aware of in the last year as a great specialty publisher. How to Be Ace is both a good coming of age memoir and a great primer of what asexuality is and how the social pressures to have sex and find a romantic partner can be very damaging. It also covers OCD, anxiety, and touches a bit on autism, so it manages to cover a lot of ground in 208 pages. I’d been following Burgess’s […]

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.” (Bingo Blackout & Cannonball!)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

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Books have answers, and that is one of the reasons I love them. The past few years I’ve spent some time digging into me, and how I work, and how much of what I have presented to the outside world was authentic, and how much was what I had been expected to do. I had some knowledge of aces and asexuality before reading this particularly as one of my friends is ace and has been out for at least the decade I’ve known her, probably […]



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