Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


*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). […]

“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”

The Three Musketeers (The d'Artagnan Romances, #1) by Alexandre Dumas

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Nobody told me this book would be funny! Well, in case you didn’t know it, this book is funny! I did know it would be ridiculously long, but I did the audiobook, and Bill Homewood was a very fun narrator, and it didn’t feel as long as it could have. For some reason, I’ve always thought this book would be boring, but it’s a swashbuckling adventure Romance, so in hindsight that was a weird opinion to have. Maybe because the cover looks boring, or I’m […]

What an absolute waste of a great book cover.

Death on Gokumon Island (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, #4) by Seishi Yokomizo

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I think I might be done with this series. It’s really lost its charm. I might give it one more go if they translate a fifth book, but it will be by hard copy not by audio. You expect a certain amount of clashing cultural mores when you read a book that was written over fifty years before, but when I read Agatha Christie, for instance, it’s usually just small stuff you can roll your eyes at and be like, ugh you dumb people in […]



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