Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This was an interesting story that I appreciated far more than I enjoyed. Candace Chen is a 20-something in middle-management at a Manhattan publishing company, in the specialty Bible division. She is good at her job, but she doesn’t really like much about it. It’s a job, it pays the bills. But she has no passion for it. But Candace, like many of her generation, doesn’t really know what it is that she actually does have passion for. She used to like photography, and had […]

You’ll write many stories, but every one will be to some greater or lesser degree about this story.

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I am, in all honesty and with true sincerity, starting to question reality. Remember when I read The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower #2) and complained that King needs an editor because he shouldn’t be referring to his own work (the film version of The Shining) as content experienced by new characters in this totally different world? And then I read Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower #4) and I was like, “TUBE NECK HOW DARE YOU?!” but then totally turned around on it, and […]

This is what KA demands.

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I couldn’t tell you whether it’s because I have finally given in to this journey, or whether it’s that the telling gets stronger as King’s writing matures, but riding this wave has become comfortable, easy, and more and more thrilling. I probably should (but choose not to) brace myself for the next book, Wolves of Calla (Book 5), because this one, The Wind Through the Keyhole (Book 4.5) was written eight years after the final book of the “The Dark Tower” series. I had a choice to […]

I think she’s part of another story.

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I have been consistently conflicted about “The Dark Tower” series. Somehow, in spite of my frustrations, annoyances, aggravations, and declared boredom, I cannot put it down! This book, Book Four, Wizard and Glass, is a perfect example of this conflict: I am in love with the characters who come from “our” world: Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, the normals with whom, of course, we’re meant to identify, are the perfect hook for me. And then there’s sweet and loyal and probably brilliant, Oy, the billy bumbler […]

He walked like no man on earth, I swear he had no name.

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As you know by now, I’m a sucker for Uncle Stevie. Anything he writes, I’ll read. Novel, short story, op-ed, tweets, collaborations…I’m there. That’s why I’m a Constant Reader. This isn’t the first collaboration with another author that I’ve read by King. He wrote a few short stories with his son, Joe Hill that were pretty good (In the Tall Grass was legitimately terrifying). His book with Stewart O’Nan, Faithful, is probably my favorite non-fiction book of all time. So, even though I had never […]



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