Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ingres77

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I've been doing this since 2015, and though I'm not going to read a hundred books a year, I plan on doing this for the foreseeable future. I also maintain the Cannonball Read database, and make infrequent updates on our reading habits. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ingres77's Quick Questions interview.)

ingres77's Reviews:

There are serious criticisms about this book, and your mileage may vary – but I found it worthwhile, if not necessarily convincing

How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi

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I came at this book obliquely. I think I tried reading Stamped from the Beginning a couple years ago, but it didn’t really grab me. Going into this, I only had a vague sense of what he’s arguing for here, but I wasn’t fully convinced. It just seemed a little silly to me that everything has to either be “racist” or “antiracist”. And I disagree with his idea of amending the Constitution to reflect this – the implications of that are…complicated. To back up a […]

I touched madness in my youth, and it has stayed with me

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

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At his worst, HP Lovecraft was a racist Anglophile who droned with an incessantly archaic and enigmatical prose that was shifted towards the purple. His characters could be bland and forgettable, and his plots often served no further purpose than presenting an unknowable horror to destroy the minds of these lifeless homuncular denizens of the Lovecraftian realm. I don’t read a lot of HP Lovecraft. But at his best, he can pull you into a dark and unpleasant reality, barely glimpsed beyond the horizon. A […]

Everyone is secretly terrible – but there is hope for even the poorest of souls

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

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I’ve never read a Brandon Sanderson book I didn’t like. He’s insanely prolific, which sharply contrasts him with some of his colleagues, and is sturdy and reliable. And (I say this every time I read a book of his), I really just accept the fact that I’m going to like them and that everyone is right: these are good books. Maybe it’s just the contrarian in me, but I’m always skeptical. And The Way of Kings was no different. I bought this book….maybe five years […]

Two powerhouses of speculative fiction do not necessarily equal a great story.

The Original by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal

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I could’ve sworn I’d already reviewed this novel, but I apparently haven’t. I read it about a month ago, and I barely remember it. Because of that, I had to look up the plot write-up on Amazon: “In the near future, humans choose life – for a price. Injectable nanite technology is the lifeblood that flows through every individual wishing to experience the world through the lens of their own theme. While death from mortal wounds is still possible, life is made easier in a […]

There is nothing new to say about these books, so these are my idle thoughts.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

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J.R.R. Tolkien began working on what would eventually become the world depicted so beautifully in The Lord of the Rings while convalescing after the Battle of the Somme, during WWI. Over the subsequent thirty-some years, he would expand his creation to include multiple fully-developed languages, and a fully-realized legendarium that covered thousands of years of history and numerous cultures. It is a singularly amazing achievement, unrivaled by any single creator of whom I am familiar. His works have influenced just about every fantasy author over […]

Two stories that couldn’t be more different

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

We Are All Monsters Here by Kelley Armstrong

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Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein (4 stars) What, exactly, is money? How does it work? Why does it work? How did it develop? What I’ve always assumed, and what I think most people who think about it assume, is that money evolved from early barter economies. Instead of selling, for instance, crops for money, early farmers would exchange crops for things that they needed. So a farmer would have to find, say, a potter and exchange a bushel of […]



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