Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Halbs

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I'm left-handed! (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Halbs's Quick Questions interview.)

Halbs's Reviews:

In the year 3,000…

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 by L. Ron Hubbard

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Around this time last year, I finished reading War and Peace. That was a bucket list book that took me a loooong time to finish but that I found to be worth the effort. This year, I finished the 1,000+ pages of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. Hubbard isn’t Tolstoy, but I finished the book feeling accomplished and that my reading efforts were rewarded. As you can guess from the title and the cover, Battlefield Earth is set a millennium from now. Human society has devolved, […]

“Reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader.”

Literature & Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre

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I picked up this little curiosity at a bookstore featured in Texas Monthly magazine. You know how people say you eat with your eyes first? The meal starts before you eat? I wonder if you sometimes start engaging with a book in a bookstore before opening the cover. In this case, I felt a little more adventurous while roaming the stacks. My TBR list was nowhere in sight. I was having fun making small talk, eavesdropping on the locals’ coffee circle, and just existing in […]

“Much remains unknown because there is so much to know.”

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

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Many thanks to esmemoria for setting the example of how to review a philosophy book in this review of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. It inspired me to review Russell. Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy starts simply. As a thought experiment, Russell asks the reader to picture a table. What do you see? What can you really know about what you see? Do you know there is table, or do you know your sense-data, which makes you think “table”? In this way, the book is […]

My Favorite YA Since Rainbow Rowell!

Twelfth Knight by Alexene Farol Follmuth

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Author Alexene Farol Follmuth (aka Olivie Blake of The Atlas Six fame) wrote Twelfth Knight as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night. And, as the writer herself notes in the back matter of the book, the novel is written in the vein of early 2000s teen rom-coms (I’m thinking She’s the Man, for obvious reasons). The book follows the lives of two main characters: Viola “Vi”  Reyes and Jack “Duke” Orsino. Vi presents to her schoolmates as unapologetically herself – blunt, smart, and a […]

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Paris

Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

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About a year ago, I read and reviewed Swann’s Way, which is the first volume of Proust’s (in)famous Remembrance of Things Past. In the first book, the narrator is a young boy, trying to make sense of the world of adults. Surprisingly, a lot of that book is about Swann, an adult socialite a neighbor of the narrator’s family. Swann makes some rather unorthodox choices in his love life, and the narrator’s family feels the ripples of those choice. Within a Budding Grove is the […]

Walk the Wire

Mercy of the Gods by James S.A. Corey

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Mercy of the Gods is James S.A. Corey’s follow-up to The Expanse and the first book in the planned trilogy called The Captive’s War. Since Corey’s The Expanse is my favorite sci-fi book series, I think I was primed to enjoy Mercy of the Gods. And, guess what – I did enjoy Mercy of the Gods. A lot. That being said, Mercy isn’t just more of the same. The Expanse jumped genres quite a bit – some books in the series were Westerns, some were […]



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