Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When Satire Isn’t

Severance by Ling Ma

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I wonder what it was like to read this book pre-COVID. Because I can tell you that reading it now, six years after COVID hit, it’s not as satirical as perhaps the author intended. In Severance, the deadly virus definitively originates in China and makes sort-of zombies (not the brain-eating kind) from the infected. Other than that difference, this book is spookily prescient. So much so that I had to keep re-checking the original publication date, but, yeah, Severance was first published in August of […]

Woo Pig Sooie

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

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Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid takes place over one semester at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Most of the book takes place in the scholarship/transfer student dorm there. And the main cast of characters includes a few RAs and residents of the dorm, as well as a visiting professor/writer from the north. I know this book won’t be for everyone, but aside from a couple of issues, it was very much for me. One, I found much of the book to be […]

Side Quest Central

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

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Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is a pretty good continuation of the Carl and Donut dungeon crawl. The characters and seat of the pants problem solving are still there, the dark humor that’s both tragic and still entertaining is still there. Plot-wise this volume gets thin; much like the side quest emphasis (new feature of this volume), there is not a lot of progress in the main overall situation. There’s also isn’t  a ton of character development beyond the “game character” that everyone has to perform to […]

I hit the 7th Cannonball with pun and fun

Deep Thoughts from a Shallow Grave: Epitaphs to Die For by Anthony Martignetti

The Man Who Didn't Like Animals by Deborah Underwood

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I like to read and I enjoy writing reviews. But sometimes a book is not able to produce a long review. There isn’t a lot to say, or if you do, there are more words in your review than the actual book. These below titles fall into that category as well as the category of sometimes you cannot find a theme to link books together in a review other than they don’t allow for longer reviews and they have nothing in common. And that is […]

Much Tragic. So Drama.

The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales by Thomas Hardy

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Must confess.  In my late teens, I went on a Thomas Hardy binge.  British lit wasn’t new to me, but something about Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd just hit my tragic drama queen teen heart.  Read everyone I could get my hands on, and in those days, there was a fair bit to be found, in school libraries and even public ones.  Inevitably the protagonist (and it was usually a heroine) came to a sad end, and I was there […]

An extremely unexpected new favorite.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

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This book spoke to me. Katrina Kim is the most lovable, vulnerable mess of a human. I would find it concerning how much I identified with her* if I wasn’t too busy enjoying every bonkers moment of this book. I was worried as I approached the end, given how I’d lost my mind over it so far, that the ending wouldn’t do Katrina justice, but I shouldn’t have been worried. I cried happy tears and felt much resolution. *I have OCD and she does too, […]



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