Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


All this gore and good for her friendship just warmed my lil heart. (The cats helped.)

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. I was sitting here thinking about how I should rate this, and I just really, really enjoyed myself, so I’m rounding this 4.5 star book up to five. Perhaps it is because there are two cats in here and one of them is a black one, and perhaps it is because of the ending, but regardless, I’m doing it, and I have no regrets. I liked the first […]

Es-ca-pé! I wonder what that means. It’s funny . . . It’s spelled just like the word ‘escape’.

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Continuing my recent trend of perfect little genre novellas*, Obstetrix was exactly what I was wanting it to be. We follow Liz, a doctor who was recently prosecuted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota (the jury deemed her not guilty). Fresh off being traumatized, she is then kidnapped by a Christian fundamentalist cult to be their OBGYN. *A short novel? It’s just over 200 pages, my cutoff for […]

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 […]

When a great story is adapted into a great movie, x2

Different Seasons by Stephen King

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At least 30 years ago I read The Shining and really enjoyed it, so I’m not sure why I never picked up another book by Stephen King. Probably it’s because I’m not a huge horror fan, although Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House started to change my mind about that. Recently, a friend of mine convinced me that I should try Different Seasons, and knowing that it contained the novella that was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption, I thought, “Yes! Excellent idea!” It’s always […]

“If I were to live here in Cardiff, by the sea, I think that another self would emerge in me. My soul.”

Cardiff, By the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates presents four uneasy novellas of suspense, all of which are centered around a woman in peril, often from the male forces in her life. Cardiff, by the Sea – 3.5 stars Clare, an academic who was adopted as a toddler, returns to her unknown past when she unexpectedly inherits a house from her birth grandmother, but what she learns about her birth family leaves her unmoored. I loved the prose in this novella (as I did in all of them), as well […]

The first T. Kingfisher book is one of my new faves!

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

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“All you had were pigs and enthusiasm. It’s not your fault.” The first book Ursula Vernon wrote under the penname T. Kingfisher; she self-published it because trad publishing did not want to subject children to things they felt were “inappropriate.” Meanwhile, she’s over here in her introduction to the new, adorable trad-published version of this book, saying things like, kids would appreciate a dead body or two. And I agree with her! Anyway, this book is in the tradition of Pratchett, with T. Kingfisher proclivities […]



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