Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My Second Tove Jansson and the Newest Murderbot

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells At this point, the Murderbot books are basically comfort reads. If you’ve read enough of them, you have a general idea of what’s going to happen and how things will end up, always accompanied by a healthy dose of snark and sarcasm from Murderbot. In this one, we start off with Murderbot tagging along with Three, another “rogue” SecUnit, at the start of a rescue mission. Said rescue mission goes awry pretty quickly, because this is a Murderbot book. At this point […]

Lovely Relationship Between Grandmother and Granddaughter

The Summer Book by Tove Jannson, translated by Thomas Teal

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This was a lovely little book that’s a quick read and also occasionally, and unexpectedly, made me laugh out loud. Translated from Finnish, it’s the story of young Sophia and her grandmother, told in vignette form. They spend their summers on one of the many Finnish islands. Sophia’s father is there in a limited way; the focus is on Sophia and her grandmother as they explore the island and talk to each other. There are also symbolic references to the death of Sophia’s mother, which […]

Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair

Sun City by Tove Jansson

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Veering far afield from her native Finland, Jansson (of Moomin fame) writes of the denizens of St. Petersburg, Florida, and its retirement community.  They live in retirement hotels, within walking distance of the piers and parks, not to mention the Bounty.  Built as a full-scale replica for the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty, it served as a tourist attraction connected with the St. Petersburg Museum of History from the mid-60s through the mid-80s, and its masts are easily viewed from the porches and verandas […]

Friendship

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

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Best for: Those looking for a mix between short stories and a novel. In a nutshell: Jonna and Mari are artists and friends who are in their 70s and live at opposite ends of an apartment building on an island. Worth quoting: “She’s not shy; she just won’t bother trying to be pleasant. She thinks it’s artistic to be gloomy.” Why I chose it: My partner gave this to me as a gift, I think because it’s a novel about friendship, not romantic love, and […]

The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight.

Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson

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Moomins! I’ve never actually read any of the Moomin books as far as I can tell, but it’s possible I did as a kid. I do know that that I’ve read several of Tove Jansson’s adult books including her collected stories. As an adult writer, she’s incredibly playful and funny and endearing, but like a lot of Scandinavian (and European writers) there’s a dark underbelly to a lot of the sensible kinds of joy her books are about. My favorite of these is The Summer Book […]



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