Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Though I’m not the audience for this, I think y’all need to read

Balloon by Bruce Handy and Julie Kwon

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Sorry Bruce Handy, but I am not digging the mostly wordless text to the story called Balloon. It is Julie Kwon’s illustrations that captured my attention and kept me moving along. However, I love the story that inspired your book. I really love that your son named his cat Balloon in honor of the lost balloon. And yes, the cat of your daughter has an equally cool name. I love unusual names for pets and I can only think of a few other names that […]

Markov Chain Text Generator – the Mystery Novel!

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

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This book seems like it has everything: Iron Age sacrificial burials! Dangerous saltwater marshes! Academics drawn into police investigations! Bird enthusiasts! New Age mysticism! Scary Biblical passages! Gruff but sensitive detectives! Murder! Cats! Bones! All of the things that would normally draw me into the depths of a novel- there was a promise of being sucked out to sea in the dangerous salt marshes, but I was left on shore squinting into the distance with an annoyed “is that it?” stuck in my craw. The […]

soft-core misery porn

Turbulence by David Szalay

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An older woman is on a plane. She and her seatmate are strangers. There is a bout of – wait for it – turbulence, that inserts her into her seatmate’s life. So it begins; a series of lives briefly touching lives from one story to the next. I’m sure that I was meant to feel something while reading this; something was supposed to catch my breath, quicken my heart rate- it was supposed to hit emotionally. Really, I just felt Szalay going through the motions. […]

Rare Disappointment in Discworld

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I can’t NOT love a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, but I may have loved this one a little  (OK, maybe a lot) less than I usually love a gallop through Discworld, maybe because it was more of a trot than a gallop?  This book was less lively, less chock full of barbed hilarity, less truly representative of my favorite characters, less magical–all perhaps because it was written after the great Mr. P. had Alzheimers–I’ve even seen some say it can’t have been written by him […]



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