Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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And then there were…

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

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I’m not really into classic detective fiction. While I definitely enjoy a mystery and a puzzle (ooh, and a murder!) in whatever I read, I’ve not once had the urge to pick up a Sherlock Holmes novel, and only vaguely know about Agatha Christie’s famous stories. In fact, while The Decagon House Murders is loosely based on Christie’s And Then There Were None, I only knew about the latter’s infamously racist original title, nothing about the story itself. Decagon is, as I learned, a prime example […]

When a cog is broken, you throw it away.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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Keiko Furukura has been different her entire life, and she’s always to understand why she makes people uncomfortable. As a child, she found a dead bird and she brought it to her mother, who responded with sympathy and an offer to bury it. Keiko instead wanted to eat it. One day at school, two boys were fighting. Horrified, one of the girls screamed for someone to break them up, so Keiko grabbed a shovel and hit one of them over the head. And that was […]

lovely, stinking, brutal, sunburned, magical, and filthy.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

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Jacob de Zoet is a young man of meager means. He has hitched his hopes to the Dust East India Company- he’ll spend several trading seasons on Dejima- about as far away from home and his fiancée as he can physically be. What is Dejima? Why, I’m glad you asked! The year is 1799, and Japan is very strict in regards to foreign interference and influence. Following disasters interactions with the Spanish and Portuguese decades earlier, Japan is a closed empire. Dejima, a man-made island […]

Manga and Me

Asadora! V01 by Naoki Urasawa

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I started the book Asadora! V01 thinking there was going to be some big excitement on every page (meaning our main character would be a Pippi Longstocking type of gal getting in and out of mischief with their friends). Instead, Naoki Urasawa gives us one very large, devastating moment, and the rest of the book is what we do to survive. We try and survive every day (Asa is one of 12 children), what we do to save face (a side story of a boy […]

Not a book for me.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

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I really need to stop ordering the lit-fic option from Book of the Month. It so very rarely ends well. The premise here is that Mike and Benson are a couple. Mike is a chef and Benson is a daycare worker. Mike’s father is dying of cancer, and so he decides one day to go to Japan to mend their relationship, leaving Benson alone in their one bedroom apartment with his visiting mother, who only arrived that morning, also from Japan. Also, their relationship is […]



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