If I had to summarize my feelings for this book in one sentence, it would read something like, “This is so silly, but I love it!” In all honesty, I don’t know why I had never heard of Bo Burnham until recently, and I must say that although he is a little ridiculous and random, I find his brand of comedy to be extremely amusing. Egghead: Or, You Can’t Survive on Ideas Alone is a short book of poems with accompanying drawings by Chance Bone; the […]
Chinese/U.S. Relations Viewed Through the Lens of a Murder Mystery
Flower Net is the first of a trilogy by this author, whose Snow Flower and the Secret Fan blew me away when I read it several years ago. This book travels back and forth between the U.S. and China in 1997, and is an incisive political commentary couched in a splendid if somewhat gruesome murder mystery. Liu Hulan is a beautiful young Chinese detective who has had to fight hard to achieve her respected status, but has to contend with the fact that is a […]
It’s really all about the cat
It’s probably not surprising to anyone that I heard about To Say Nothing of the Dog [Or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last] (1998) by Connie Willis from another Cannoball review. Time travel and science fiction aren’t my go-to genres but the review was more than convincing enough for me to expand my normal boundaries. This was an impressive work: a mixture of romance, mystery, and science-fiction with the clever, lighthearted feeling of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. I enjoyed this book, but […]
Who killed Kurt Cobain?????
Since I am essentially close to being an old person (30th birthday next month!), I decided to revisit my youth with my first book in the Cannonball Read, Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain written by Max Wallace and Ian Halperin. As you can probably tell from the title, this book is about a well-known theory that Courtney Love of the band Hole had some degree of involvement in the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain of the epic grunge band Nirvana. The […]