Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About andtheIToldYouSos

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Bookseller by day, book reader by night...and hopefully a reviewer somewhere in between. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: andtheIToldYouSos's Quick Questions interview.)

andtheIToldYouSos's Reviews:

“burn before reading”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El -Mohtar & Max Gladstone

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If this is what the Time War feels like, then I volunteer as tribute. This two-hander from Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone burns bright right in the center of your chest and dares you to put it out. Red and Blue are operatives on either side of a war that has been going on since before time existed and well past the end of the universe. They are fierce and wild warriors; brilliant minds matched with brilliant and sharp teeth. They claw their way through […]

TEENS! IN! SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

The Disasters by M. K. England

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Got in juuuuuust under the wire with this one! Another #CannonBookClub pick, another book I probably wouldn’t have picked up without being told to do so! Fortunately, it was fast-paced, warm-hearted, just dangerous enough hold me in suspense, and (last but not least) cute. The basic set up is, well, pretty basic: misfit teens up against their own social structure and a corrupt regulatory force in a race against time to stop the big bad thing from being big and bad. The misfits get into […]

“I googled ‘monkey brothel’, had an existential crisis, and eventually found the details I wanted in a New Yorker article titled ‘Monkey Business’.”

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

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Frequently, I find myself disagreeing with Sara Pascoe- but it’s not a problem! She’s funny, curious, and well-researched, and she makes no claims about being objective. She leans right into the fact that she her opinions are colored by her past experiences, and she remains open to other ideas and beliefs even if they do not mesh with hers. She is open and honest about her past experiences- especially those that pertain to sex, power, and money. Some are truly harrowing, yet she is a […]

Too Much and Too Little

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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Rivers Solomon tells an unflinching tale of slavery and survival, set in a future that is horrifically similar to both America’s dreadful past and terrible present. They sugarcoat nothing; what else would you expect from a story that starts with a gruesome amputation? I have to applaud Solomon for writing a brutal and gut wrenching story. They shout out the horrors of racism, giving graphic depictions of brutality. Black women are tortured, raped, and publicly executed, and Solomon makes you stare at these scenes of […]

“Heroes hate wasting time. ‘You’re wasting my time,’ they’ll say. Yet they devote very little time to time management, and rarely consult a diary.”

The Grip of Film by Richard Ayoade

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Another Ayoade book! So exciting! Except….wait. This is barely Ayoade. Yes, he wrote it, and yes, he does some narration- “some” being the key word in this situation. The Grip of Film is a fake book written by a fake person (written by Ayoade, naturally). The fake person is Gordy LaSure; a longtime Hollywood vagrant and alleged screenwriter. Gordy is a (purposefully) contemptible character; he has the bravado of The Kids Stays in the Picture with a fraction of the success and (at least) four times the casual […]

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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If we- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world It is time to listen. James Baldwin had a voice unlike any other. He transcends country, creed, and time. His work is astonishing and terribly important. The […]



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