Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Sorely Lacking Keanu Reeves. One Star.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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The year is 1897 and Bram Stoker is a bored businessmen who boosts his income by writing pulpy novels. The most famous of these, simply titled Dracula, was not an immediate hit, but would turn out to define Stoker’s legacy. This isn’t entirely undeserved, but outside of its snug historical pocket the novel doesn’t come across all that well. The story is well-known to nearly everyone, and I was quite surprised at how closely, at first, it follows the 1993 movie. And yet this film, as well as other films before and after it, have chosen to add details or […]

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1/7/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:3 |

Kill Your Darlings

All Souls Trilogy: A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness

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Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally ill) exist and walk among us. Humans don’t know about them. Trying to write a […]

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1/28/2018 's CBR10 Review No:3 |

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

Song of Susannah by Stephen King

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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 decided to buy the whole kit and kaboodle, because his pitch turned out to be […]

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7/24/2017 's CBR9 Review No:31 |

First the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

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Homestretch on Ye Olde Darke Towere Marathone! I’m actually starting to be sad that there are only two left plus the movie. And there had better be whole bunch of those, too, is what I’m saying, do ya. If I’m being honest, I think that Stephen King didn’t start leaning into the conceit of this series until about the time that I went all in, and that’s probably the reason I was finally able to invest fully. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that the first few books in the series really were still finding their […]

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7/16/2017 's CBR9 Review No:30 |

The original vampire-ess

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

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Bram Stoker may have been the first to perfect the literary vampire, but he was certainly not the first to creep people out with a good monster. Carmilla was here first (by over 20 years), and she is perfectly frightening herself. After a carriage crashes near their remote forest estate, our narrator Laura and her father agree to take in a young woman as their guest while her mother travels on and promises to return for her. Not too surprisingly, young girls in the nearby village start dying of a mysterious ailment following a vivid nightmare of a monster in their […]

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3/29/2017 's CBR9 Review No:6 |

A bit too much of the wrong brother

The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L Howard

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This is the fourth book in the Johannes Cabal series, and the only one that uses its main character sparingly. I loved the first three Cabal novels, particularly Johannes Cabal the Detective, which is the second one. I also love the handful of Cabal short stories, particularly Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day, the first Cabal story and a brilliant introduction to a brilliant character. Johannes Cabal is a German-born man who was raised from middle childhood in England. He is a necromancer ‘of some little infamy’, a career he undertook at the age of 18 when the girl he loved accidentally […]

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1/16/2017 's CBR9 Review No:3 |

The more I read these books, the more I like to think it’s an adult Harry Potter.

The Dresden Files (8-15) by Jim Butcher

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I hope it goes without saying that, if you haven’t read these books, beware the spoilers that follow. I’ve tried to not give away major plot points for each book, but if you’re on book three, you may not want to read the following reviews. Harry Potter was one of those foundational stories, for me. It laid the groundwork for what I deem good in this world. To some degree, everything I’ve read since has been weighed against the mark left on my soul by those books. There is no recapturing the magic I found there, but I keep hoping […]

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4/26/2016 's CBR8 Review No:34 |

A triple-dip in which I admit my lust for an Austen villain

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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Even with audiobook during travels and a major cleaning expedition, this *STILL* took an entire summer to read. Whew. I didn’t realize that when I casually decided to read Dracula, that it was quite an undertaking. This book was a lot different than I expected it to be, but that didn’t turn out to be a bad thing. Until the second half disappointed me quite a bit. If you have ever heard anything about vampires, vampire lore, or the unfortunate Twilight saga, you’ll know that Dracula is a key text in vampire lore and one of the most prominent 19th-century […]

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8/10/2015 's CBR7 Review No:156 |


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