Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Bothari43

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When writing a genre-based lim'rick / Avoid lengthy 'post-apoc'lyptic' / Though CB reviews / Have broadened my views / My fave is still chick-written sci-fic (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Bothari43's Quick Questions interview.)

Bothari43's Reviews:

Yer a wizard, Peter…but not that kind

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

by 1 Comment

The plot on this one sounds pretty unoriginal – rookie London cop sees ghosts – but it ended up taking a few unexpected turns. Peter Grant is a rookie, just about to be assigned to the most boring and paperwork-heavy department, when a ghost tells him he witnessed a murder. Peter checks into the ghost’s story (very open-minded of him, I thought) and finds out that maybe he’s not going crazy. Then he gets assigned to the mysterious Detective Nightingale, and learns all sorts of […]

Quick Questions with a Cannonballer: Rachel

by 5 Comments

The readership loves your end-of-post stats! Have you always tracked how long it took you to finish a book, etc., or did you start that for CBR? I started tracking how long it took me to read a book several years ago. Goodreads makes it very simple for me to track all of my books, even when I started and finished reading based on when I update my progress in a book. Before Goodreads, I used a good old pen and paper, and I have […]

Teenagers can still be bratty, even when they’re immortal

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

by 1 Comment

This sounded like an interesting take on time travel, and there was a kernel of a cool idea in there. Sometime in the future, time travel is invented, but it only works in very limited ways: you can’t go to the future, you can’t change recorded history, etc. So the super-rich company that invented it also invents immortality, which also comes with rules: it only works when you catch a human very young and adaptable. So, they start sending operatives into the past to ‘recruit’ […]

Getting my nerd card revoked

Unlocking the Air by Ursula K. Le Guin

by 3 Comments

You guuuuuuys, I feel terrible, but I did NOT enjoy this. The writing is, of course, incredible. It’s amazing how quickly Le Guin can set a scene and sketch out a character. Even the stories that were only a few pages long had an incredibly clear snapshot of a person or a setting. She can make a character feel real with only a few paragraphs. However. They’re not real stories, which is what my brain had been expecting. A lot of them are completely aimless […]

crystalclear picked a good one!

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

by 2 Comments

I got this cheeky book from crystalclear for the 2019 CBR Book Exchange. I had seen a few so-so reviews for it already, so I was a little worried going into it, but I enjoyed it so much! I can see why some folks didn’t wholeheartedly embrace it, but the potential pitfalls didn’t bother me at all. We are dropped into this world with little to no explanation. Gideon Nav, an orphan who was raised on a planet ruled by the Ninth House necromancers, is […]

The continuing adventures of critters you wouldn’t expect to care about

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by 1 Comment

I was wowed by the scope of Children of Time, and it just keeps getting bigger in Children of Ruin. I was expecting a straightforward sequel, but as with the first book, all of my predictions were (delightfully!) wrong. It also covers a huge span of time, but it starts out concurrent with the first book, following a different terraforming crew. They find a couple of neighboring planets that have terraforming potential and get to work. Things go off the rails astoundingly rapidly. This is […]



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