Cannonball Read 17

I picked up Am I Blue?, an anthology of “gay and lesbian” stories for young adults right around when it was published in 1994. I was in middle school, which I had entered with a new haircut that earned me a lot of accusations from more ignorant classmates. But I think this was just a coincidence; I don’t remember questioning my sexuality or gender despite those...

I am very far behind my book goal for the year so far, so I did some TBR triage by moving shorter books up to the front of the request queue with my library. Poets Square is one of the first of that reshuffle to make its way to me and was a welcome bit of solace this past weekend. Poets Square is Courtney Gustafson’s story of how she accidentally inherited a feral colony of 30 c...

One of the reasons I love romance novels is that there are infinite ways to tell a story. Ship Happens is a second chance romance, and as such, it looks at whether the initial breakup was a good choice, what has happened to the characters since they broke up, and whether, if they get back together, can they make it work? The way Deaver explores those questions feels fresh, and n...

Still making my way through the re-read of the Laundry files novels and I’ve hit on one of my favorites. The Apocalypse Codex is set nearly a year ofter the events of The Fuller Memorandum, and poor Bob is still sort of in recovery. It’s not just the whole business of receiving a bit of a soul-shellacking from the Black Pharaoh, which seems obvious from the last book. But it’s a...

I learned today (June 4 2026) that Marjane Satrapi passed away at 56 years old. It sounds as though she died of a broken heart as it was a little more than a year after her husband’s death. I cannot say how this saddens me. I really have no words. I mean, I can say how she was an amazing author who opened my eyes to a world I would never have known otherwise. How it made m...