Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About kimberleybear

CBR 6
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Dog lover, selective fangirl, boy crazy. Dubious gamer cred. Generally nice if impolite. Acknowledged tendency to fall for fictional characters. Collects swear words. Classy yet trashy. Difficulty with commitment.

kimberleybear's Reviews:

“The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.”

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

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I’ll come across book recommendations from a variety of sources. Lots of times I’ll have read about them on my own, or found my way to them via other authors that I already like. Sometimes somebody I know will recommend something that I will actually read. Occasionally I’ll wander around one of my local libraries in a familiar section and find something decent that way. Lately I’ve stumbled on a few through YouTubers or podcasters I like, and this was one of those. The Gone […]

Girl Interrupted

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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As someone who has been both correctly diagnosed and misdiagnosed with conditions concerning my brain, I was really interested in Susannah Cahalan’s story once I heard about it (I’m also just a weird disease junkie in general). Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is a terrifying thing — one of those autoimmune disorders where the body just goes into attack mode on itself for unknown reasons. It results in a cascade of symptoms, starting from something that looks like the flu to a range of major behavior disturbances […]

There’s a Good YA Novel in Here Somewhere…

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

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This was one of those books that I picked up on a whim in the reading room downstairs while I was waiting on some library loans. “Pulitzer Prize,” I thought. “This will probably not suck.” And it definitely doesn’t suck. But it did take me nearly a month to read, and for a 530-page work of fiction — a pageturner it was not, at least for me. The setup: Two teenagers, Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig, come of age in 1930s France and Germany respectively. […]

This book confused my brain in ways it did not intend

Neuromancer by William Gibson

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**Expository wordiness up top. Feel free to skip to the actual book-related stuff if you like. A few things right up top: A few years ago, I flirted with playing a card game called Android: Netrunner. My partner was way more into it than I was, but occasionally I’d build a deck or two and spar with him, just to give him something to play against. I included a link to the Wikipedia article on the game there, because it’s a lot to explain if […]

Fascinating Premise, Frustrating Execution

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

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I’ll start with the setup: This book has a really fascinating premise. Humans have figured out cloning technology and its use is now fairly widespread. There has been unceasing civil unrest over the idea, and there are now certain rules that clones (or those looking to become clones) have to abide by, but human clones are now more or less ubiquitous. Basically when you die, a new you, at the peak of your physical form, is woken up and downloads all the memories of your […]

Space Opera Done Fantastic

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

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You guys, I really, really liked this book. Let’s start off there. It combines what I loved in the first parts of The Expanse series with Star Trek, stirs in the best bits of Firefly, and then adds a bunch of its own stuff. It’s very good. If that’s all you need to get you started, then go forthwith and devour at the next available opportunity. But I can’t get away with that little of a review, and I don’t really want to anyway, so […]



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