Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“Books are Doors and I wanted out”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix B. Harrow

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#CBR12 Bingo: Debut Official book description: In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artefacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place.   Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world […]

The Greatest Library that Never Was

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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I was a huge fan of the Night Circus, so I was ecstatic when the lovely faintingviolet shared her copy of the Starless Sea with me. To give too much of the plot away takes all the joy out of reading this story, but the baseline is that there’s a magical library hidden underground accessible by doorways above. The nature through which patrons find these doors varies to fate, and in recent years, someone’s been closing all the doors. At least until a grad student named Zachery stumbles […]

Somehow this all seems familiar

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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I don’t remember how I heard about The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, but I saw it on a library shelf not long after I heard about it, so of course I had to check it out (pun intended). The story concentrates on two brothers, Rob the older from whose perspective the story comes, and Charley the younger, genius of the sort who finished a PhD and publishes an academic book on Dickens at the age of nineteen. There is the usual kind of brotherly […]

Would have liked there to be a stronger romance element

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman

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4.5 stars From Goodreads, because it’s been over a month since I finished this: The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, a world-class planner and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, […]

A Beautiful Dropkick to the Heart

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin

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Alias is one of those tv shows that I just missed. Never really thought about it until 15 years after it debuted. I knew people watched it, I knew it was a thing, but I didn’t watch it. This summer, though, I started checking out all of the Alias DVDs at the library on a whim. Since then, I’ve become something of a Jennifer Garner completionist. This coincided nicely with my quest to become a Timothy Olyphant completionist. They co-starred in a rom-dramedy (?) called […]

Darkly Enchanting

The Binding by Bridget Collins

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It’s been a long time since a book has really grabbed me and not let go until the end. I’m a slow reader these days, usually taking 2 – 3 weeks to finish a book since I only read at night before bed. But The Binding demanded my time. I read it everywhere, foregoing all kinds of adulting in favor of immersing myself in Collins’ world, and I finished it in about 3 days. In the world of The Binding, there are people who have the […]



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