Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I'm trying to catch up with my reading And my writing And my everything, really. Not actually a platypus (Learn more about this Cannonballer: LittlePlat's Quick Questions interview.)

LittlePlat's Reviews:

A Journey to the Center of Life

Gen: Perjalanan Menuju Pusat Kehidupan by Siddharta Mukherjee; Damaring Tyas W Palar

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Another (daft) reading challenge! A few years back I took the best part of 8 months to read through an Indonesian translation of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer  (Kanker Biografi Suatu Penyakit.) I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue with the rest of the translations of Mukherjee’s books. But Google Play was nothing but persistent.  So there we have it; it was a little less laborious this time, but I have managed to make my way though the translation […]

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]

Kai didn’t recognize this place at all; it was a memory of somewhere he had never been

Witch King by Martha Wells.

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With the new Murderbot adaption airing right now, I’ve been on the look out for more of Martha Wells books. The only other works of hers I’ve read have been The Books of the Raksura Series, which were mostly quite good—very different from Murderbot—but sort of a mixed bag overall. But one thing you cannot accuse Martha Wells of is lacking in creativity. Witch King is, again, vastly different from any of her previous novels, both in setting and narrative style. But it also shares […]

Careless? A Charming Understatement

Careless People: A cautionary Take of Power Greed and Lost Idealism? by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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Well, well, well, if it isn’t the worst people in the world. I don’t think I’ve been so infuriated since I read John Carreyrou’s ‘Bad Blood.’ I don’t believe there’s much left to redeem Silicon Valley at this point. Stick it all into the insinkerator and set the whole kitchen on fire for all I care. The funny thing is, I would probably have never heard of Careless People, let alone read it, if it weren’t for the suppression efforts. In a brilliant display of the […]

Power and the Written Word

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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I once had a housemate who tried to teach me some simplified Chinese written characters (hanzi). Nothing too complex, just me 我, you 你, coffee 咖啡 and tea 茶, so on and so forth. But even with such an easy lesson, I realized that some connections were harder to make than others. I was able to match the the vocalization to the meaning: Wǒ is I/me. And I would see 我 written on the page and go ahead and think ‘yes, that’s I/me’. But that […]

You Cannot be Unchosen

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

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It’s been a while since I’ve had so much difficulty writing a book review. This has nothing to do with my current work load, or even with the book being bad—far from it, the book is absolutely brilliant. You can see why it won a Nebula. It’s just surreal And a little opaque. But in a very impressive way. Especially when you consider that this is the author’s debut novel.  The Saint of Bright Doors is the story of a young man named Fetter, who […]



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