Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Cat Saved What Now?

The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa

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For at least the first half of this book, I liked it more than The Cat Who Saved Books. The main character, Nanami, is fierce and compassionate, and Tiger the cat seemed to be less of a jerk than in the first one. I’m not sure if this is legitimately the case or due to how the narrator was voicing it in the audiobook. Rintaro, the protagonist from book one, also makes an appearance. Tiger enlists—or rather, reluctantly accepts—Nanami’s aid when a man in a […]

A Weird Book and Murakami. So, Two Weird Books, I Guess

The Employees by Olga Ravn

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

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CBR18 BINGO: Craft for The Employees (unconventional/fragmented/experimental approach) and Summer for The City and Its Uncertain Walls The Employees by Olga Ravn So, I read this. Uh . . . And then I did some of this: It’s hard to know what to make of this. It’s confusing, although I do think I understood the general gist of it. To be honest, though, for a while I only knew what was happening because the book blurb tells you, and it felt like the book blurb made some of the connections […]

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 […]

A Beautiful, Quiet, Reflective Book

The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough

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CW: violent animal death This is a quiet, reflective book with beautiful, emotionally restrained prose that somehow still manages to be gently emotional. Nils Vik wakes up on what he knows will be the last day of his life and goes about his normal daily routine. He is a ferryman in Norway, someone who has spent decades carrying people across a fjord, and on this final day he follows a familiar route while also collecting the dead. These are former ferry passengers he once knew, […]

A Historical Fantasy, A “Neon-Noir” Horror, and Litfic with Magical Realism

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

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Emily’s Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales I loved being back in the world of Emily Wilde, so I had such a warm feeling reading this book, even though the stakes in this book are higher in some ways compared to the first two in the trilogy. In this one, Emily and Wendell go to Wendell’s home realm in Faerie to reclaim the throne and are met with some challenges along the way. Just as we did in the first two books, we get occasional reminders […]



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