All Systems Red by Martha Wells
[Read as an audiobook from the public library] This has been on my to-read list for a while, but it’s always checked out when I’m in the mood to read it. But this time, I said to myself, “Duh, get the audiobook.” And so I did. This is such a quick, enjoyable read. The story doesn’t really break any new ground, and the plot beats are fairly predictable, but for all that it’s still fun and a well-built world that I don’t mind spending […]
Not That Bad by Roxane Gay
[Read as an ebook from the public library] I tend to avoid books like this, because I suppose I’m yet another product of exactly what these essays address: Nothing that has ever happened to me has ever been that bad, and nothing makes that clearer than reading the experiences of others. But that’s the point of collections like these. It is that bad. It’s always been that bad. The fact that we have to consistently work to squash and minimize and fit and qualify and […]
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
[Read as an ebook from the local library] Books like this generally don’t hit my radar. I do love well executed historical fiction, but as you might know from reading my review of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, I’m not a Dickens person. Victorian England is not my particular wheelhouse. But I do like Korean film, and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s sumptuous 2016 film, follows the initial plot of this book relatively closely, so I was curious to read the original. Because this is […]
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
[Read as an audiobook from the public library] I hesitated to add this one because it’s just so old, but I honestly enjoyed it when I listened to it in January and it kicked off a good fit of audiobook consumption so I thought, might as well. My real introduction to Agatha Christie came with Phoebe Judge’s Phoebe Reads a Mystery podcast, when she read The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I have a collection of Christie mysteries knocking around the house somewhere, but I could […]
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry
[read as an ebook from my local library] If you read my little snarky Cannonball Read bio, you’ll see in addition to various other quirks and personal failings an “acknowledged tendency to fall for fictional characters.” This is not as strictly a joke as it ought to be — I have always tended (still do) to form rather strong attachments to figments of someone else’s imagination. I suppose you could call it a sort of parasocial relationship with someone who is maybe even less real […]
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
[Read as an audiobook from the public library] I don’t know what I was expecting in this book, but whatever it was, I didn’t get it. This book left me cold, more than anything. I don’t think it was supposed to – I was probably supposed to be shocked. But I was just left with a feeling of, “Huh. Okay. Well then.” Very unlike my recent reaction to, of all things, And Then There Were None, an 80 year old book that I’d never read […]
