Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Or just another lost angel, city of night”

L. A. Women (2025) by Ella Berman

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I picked this book up because I liked the font, and the colours, and I’m fascinated by Los Angeles (where, of course, I’ve never been), and its foggy shadows and neon gleam: the films, the music, the messy myths and sprawling stories. The story here is a little Natalie Beach/Caroline Calloway if they lived in the 1960s-1970s, haunting Laurel Canyon instead of Cambridge and New York. Berman’s story centres on Gala and Lane, the friend with the glitter, the friend in the shadows, and the […]

“Do geese see God?”

A Line to Kill (Hawthorne and Horowitz, #3) by Anthony Horowitz

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I didn’t realize how in the mood I was for the vibes this series gives off. I read this book so fast. There’s something so strange yet so compelling about Horowitz’s fictional detective, Hawthorne, who continues to be unlikable, baffling (to us the readers, and to his “biographer,” a fictional version of Horowitz himself), contradictory, and yet he gets the job done, thwarting both reader’s desires and the fictional character Hawthorne in the process. It’s strange, but it works. This third pairing of the duo […]

Am I Too Dumb for this Book?

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

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Crystalclear listened to the audio version of Mr. Fox and wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but it’s speculative-leaning and maybe reading the actual book would be a different experience, so she suggested it to me. While I do think it was better to read it than to listen to it (Oyeyemi does a lot with fonts, blank space, and paragraph structures that make way more sense looking at it than listening to it), I also am not totally sure how I felt about Mr. […]

Neil Gaiman is My Chesterson

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman

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I’ve had The View from the Cheap Seats on my TBR for a long time. For once, the university library had a book I actually wanted to read, so I checked it out while waiting for my local library request to come in. Gaiman’s collected nonfiction rides the gamut from his introductions to many novels, to speeches given at award ceremonies and conventions and interviews from his career as a journalist, as well as musings on writing and recollections on the people and books that have […]

The More Things Change & The Weird Wild West

How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman

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The last two-book review I wrote was compare and contrast, because the material in each book related to the other book. This time, not so much: one is non-fiction, and one is fiction, and without performing some mental calisthenics at a level I’m not willing to do right now I don’t think I could write a unified review. 



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