Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“He really does have very nice biscuits.”

Finlay Donovan Knockes 'Em Dead (Finlay Donovan, #2) by Elle Cosimano

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I love this series. I’m so happy there will be at least two more books full of wacky hijinks, dead body disposal, panicking over money, BFF frandship moments between Finlay and Vero, meta commentary, and I’m sure stuff I can’t even predict because this series is chaos. Beautiful chaos. Finlay Donovan, romantic suspense and crime author, keeps getting herself into these situations involving real life crime. It’s been several months since the first book, and it seems this time around, someone has taken a hit […]

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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I did not expect to love this book so much, but it really hit me pretty hard. I liked Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut just fine, it was fun, and I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but I didn’t connect to it emotionally like I did God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Near the beginning of the book, there’s a moment when Eliot Rosewater is thinking about Vonnegut’s stand-in writer character, Kilgore Trout, who is Eliot’s favorite author (see quote below, which also applies to sci-fi and fantasy […]

the only Scream sequel I need

The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones

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Take the meta-horror-commentary of Scream and dial it up to eleven; there at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in moonlight and brandishing a rusty machete, you will find The Last Final Girl. Stephen Graham Jones is leaning hard into the tropes of teen slasher movies, and if you aren’t in on the joke it will fly over your freshly-severed-by-garage-door-head. The story is presented almost as a film treatment; close ups, pans, POVS, and audience responses are all written in and used with cheeky abandon. […]

Delightful stubbornness

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove is about a delightfully stubborn widower in Sweden. He has a strict logic that he applies to the world. He yearns for consistency and routine. Anyone who deviates from the order is likely inefficient and an idiot in his mind. He is suspicious of most things and prefers to abstain from all social things. I enjoyed his rising frustration at the computer store when he attempts to buy a computer. Despite his crankiness, Ove fell in love with a woman named […]

Not-very good men do not very good things

Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson

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In Ferguson’s reading guide to this novel he mentions that he was heartbroken while writing this novel and this statement both surprised me and not surprised me. It starts out as a simple tale of two friends, an incident at a river and then drifting apart. Then there’s two Americans who start a religion and it seems destined that all the tales will intertwine. They do, but not in any satisfactory way. This is not a pleasant novel. It is filled with not-very good men […]

“All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.”

Some Hope (Patrick Melrose, #3) by Edward St. Aubyn

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On a prose level, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed the first two, which were extremely clever and a bit raw. Here, with Patrick sober (for several years, it’s implied), he once again is one among many points of view, just as he was in the first book as a five year old, when his parents’ dinner guests held most of the narrative focus. Here the party is for some duke or other on his birthday, and the Princess Margaret is […]



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