Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I liked this weird little gremlin book.

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

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To be clear, the book isn’t about gremlins, I’m just calling it a gremlin book because it’s weird and small and has claws but is also kind of harmless and laughable in the right light. Also also, gremlin is a fun word to use. This book is impossible to *really* talk about without spoilers, so I’m going to have a pretty big spoiler section and a smaller non-spoiler section in this review. I will try to keep the spoiler section relatively spoiler-free in the sense […]

MASTERPIECE.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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I was originally tempted to just post this whole novel as one giant (and perfect) quotation. We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies-just in case-but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home? (We were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point.) One day, when we look back at […]

Enjoyable read, in spite of being the weakest in the series

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

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Ever since I discovered Anthony Horowitz in 2019, I’ve been catching up on his previously released novels and eagerly awaiting new ones. I was, therefore, delighted to see A Line to Kill, book #3 in Horowitz’s Hawthorne series, gracing bookstore shelves while I was out Christmas shopping last month. I marched up to my husband and announced, “I’m buying this for my dad, but I would also like to add it to my Christmas list.” Because I have a husband who picks up on these types […]

This is not for you.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Maybe you’re right, Johnny. Maybe you’re right. House of Leaves opens with these words, purportedly put there by Johnny Truant, a young sex lunatic who discovers a manuscript, put together by an old man called Zampanò, about a film that may or may not exist, made by a medium-famous middle-aged photographer named Will Navidson, about a house that he lives in that’s bigger on the inside, all annotated by editors who appear unable to make further contact with Johnny. As a journalism student back in […]

cbr12bingo – UnCannon

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

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Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar. He teaches 18th century literature and queer/transgender theory. He is clever as all get out, well-researched, funny, and overflowing with empathy- all of these things brought into vivid color in his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox. I’ve selected “UnCannon” for this Bingo Square- but it was close call between UnCannon, Debut, Violet, and Pandemic (plague ships ahoy). I also almost gave it an “I Wish”, because good gravy, do I wish I could sit in on any […]

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]



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