Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Just a couple of moms and their talking cats

Urban Tails by Ilana Zeffren

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I first found Urban Tails by Ilana Zeffren as an online reader copy, though the book has been available since May 2022. I was having trouble reading it online due to the illustrations. The text bled into the images. The colors were dull and this made things feel unfinished overall. The story wasn’t engaging me. But there was something about it that made me want to read it. I knew there was something there. Perhaps it was because it was about Israel. Or because there […]

I have become a functioning part of the world.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual. ― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman Keiko is stuck in a dead-end job. She works at a Smile Mart (a chain convenience store) in Japan. She has worked there since it opened eighteen years ago. She is an exemplary worker, showing up on her scheduled work days, always early. She […]

*Such* a weird book, but I could not look away from it.

Identitti by Mithu Sanyal

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4 Book 24/30 A German professor who has been passing as Indian for her entire adult life is found to have been born white, and because she has placed herself in the public eye and has become a pop culture figure/icon, controversy explodes. (The author was inspired by the cases of people like Rachel Dolezal—who gets a couple mentions in the book—to write a story engaging with a fictional and heightened version of that story.) We see through the […]

Does *not* do what it says on the tin. Where be the witches?

In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial by Mona Chollet

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 3 Book 11/30 This one was frustrating! The title absolutely is misleading. The only witches you will get in this book are in the introduction, and in Carmen Maria Machado’s foreword. So if you find yourself digging those two parts just brace yourself that’s not what the rest of the book is like. To be fair, for the most part I found the rest of the book interesting and never wanted to stop reading it, but I came for […]

So Very Sweet

She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

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Best for: Fans of sweet little stories. And of cats. In a nutshell: Multiple cats and multiple humans change each others’ lives. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: CATS! What it left me feeling: Calm. Review: What a very sweet, deep book. It is told from the perspectives of multiple cats, some related to each other. It is also told from the perspective of the humans who come into contact with these cats. One human is trying to figure out what to do with […]

A Japanese puzzle mystery I actually managed to figure out!

Newcomer (Kyoichiro Kaga, #2) by Keigo Higashino

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Last year I read Malice, the first book from this series translated into English, and it was so twisty and intriguing, I knew I had to read everything else translated into English by this author. And this second book bodes well. Though I didn’t find it as impactful as Malice, this book makes it clear that Higashino likes to play around with format and do new things with story structure in his books (and tone! this book is much less fucked up than Malice was). […]



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