Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Dusty Highway

CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant

To paraphrase Wynonna, books are my strongest weakness. I've been away for a few years. It's time to get back to it. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Dusty Highway's Quick Questions interview - as dAvid.)

Dusty Highway's Reviews:

Why do you build me up…just to let me down?

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

by Leave a Comment

George Washington “Wash” Black had spent all of his twelve years as a field slave on a plantation in Barbados when he and friend/protector Big Kit were suddenly summoned to the master’s house to serve at table. After the tense dinner at which the master quarreled with his brother Christopher and broke Big Kit’s nose with a plate, the main house slave tells Wash he’s to stay behind and tend Christopher in his room. Big Kit tries in vain to argue Wash’s way out of […]

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

by 3 Comments

This is going to be a tough review to write. First off, I loved it, and I find those reviews difficult. Second, it’s another big Culture novel from Iain M. Banks, and as I found last year with Matter, it’s hard to distill everything into a brief review. I’ll do my best on both counts, but I’ll just start with this: for anyone who loves hard science fiction in general and space opera in particular, the Culture novels are the absolute best I’ve read. Surface […]

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it back

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

by Leave a Comment

After a string of mediocre reads starting in mid-March and culminating in my first DNF of the year, I needed a win. I was just getting over the worst of the flu but pretty much still couch-bound and sick of TV, and I just wanted something easy and enjoyable to read. Turns out, the answer was staring me in the face. Literally. On the shelf beneath the TV, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories looked up at me and said Trust in me, only in me. (I […]

Yadda yadda yadda, and there was peace throughout the land

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

by Leave a Comment

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West has been on my radar since it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. When it showed up on the shortlist for this year’s International DUBLIN Literary Award, I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about.  In an unnamed city in a long-simmering war with itself, Nadia and Saeed meet at a night class. At first cautious in their romance, they are thrown together when the fighting intensifies and Saeed’s mother is blown apart […]

In the immortal words of Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

by Leave a Comment

I pulled Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue off the shelf just before leaving on a trip to Paris, partly because I knew Paris featured in at least some of the action and also because I had just finished The Song of Achilles and felt like reading another YA boy-boy romance. But mostly it just seemed like a perfect vacation book, easy and breezy, and at least for that, it did not disappoint. Henry “Monty” Montague is the ne’er-do-well son of an […]

A (not so) funny thing happened on the way to writing this review

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

by 2 Comments

I was finally caught up with my reviews at the end of March, and then everything went to hell. I spent a week in Paris (yay!) but came home to what I thought was a simple but nasty case of jetlag + airplane cold but which turned out to be . . . THE FLU. And let me just say that jetlag and three days of crazy-loud home repairs and several days of high fever/chills/aches/lungs-filled-with-pure-evil are not conducive to being productive. Moral of the story: […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo