Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Be Gay Do Crime

Be Gay Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos by Molly Llewellyn (editor), Kristel Buckley (editor)

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Once again, I’m a sucker for a good title, and Be Gay Do Crime got me immediately. It’s a short story collection edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, and I went in assuming that it’d be a series of riots. The name evokes the proud history of queer militancy to me — the anti-normative ethos of “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you.” That’s mostly not it. Across the 16 stories collected here, there are many flavors of queerness (largely […]

“Life isn’t easy, no matter where you are. You’ll make choices you think are right, and then suffer for them.”

The Assassin’s Blade: The Throne of Glass Novellas by Sarah J. Maas

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And mine was reading this book. Years and years ago, I saw I saw a copy of A Throne of Glass in a bookstore. I didn’t buy it then, but I remembered that I wanted to get it sometime, so I (foolishly) asked for the box set of the complete series a while ago. And then I discovered that this was the prequel . So I had to read this, before I could read A Throne of Glass, before I could see if I tolerated […]

Tick Follows Tock Follows Tick Follows Tock: Late Stage Rushdie

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

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  Salman Rushdie has always played with time, but as his own clock starts to wind down it sees him more reflective than before. There are 5 stories in all, 3 novellas, and 2 short stories and 2 of these have already appeared in print in the New Yorker. Most of these stories were written after Rushdie’s very intimate brush with death in 2022 and the emotional weight of this event and his life can be felt through them all. It feels like his most […]

Please inhale, Ted Chiang

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

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In both Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and its cinematic adaptation, the 2016 film Arrival, the protagonist’s story appears out of order. You read (or watch) the narrative as though you are seeing someone put together an intricate puzzle, and it’s not until one critical piece of knowledge— the central conceit of the story — slots into place that you can understand the correct order of events, backwards and forwards. Reading “Story of Your Life” on its own, I loved it. So, I sought […]

“Imagination is hungry, and needs to be fed.”

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

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I have long maintained that, for me, Stephen King’s short stories and novellas hit harder than most of his books. I just like them more; they are snappier. While I do enjoy taking my 1,000-plus-page journey to Derry in IT, sometimes it’s nicer to have a story come in, do its thing, and then leave. You Like It Darker is Stephen King’s latest short story collection and is a mix of previously published stories (something I did not realize until I was like, “Wait… have […]

Last Defender of Camelot – one of Zelazny’s best

Last Defender of Camelot by Roger Zelazny

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After finishing a book I really hated, I needed to cleanse my palate, so to speak. The song Guinevere from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came on and I realized it had been a while since I had re-read The Last Defender of Camelot. It does not disappoint. Is the style a bit dated? Sure. Are there some problematic passages in “Damnation Alley”? Without question, especially the Nazi ones and the handling of female characters in that story (one reason why this received 4 stars […]



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