Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About narfna

CBR 4
CBR 5
CBR 6
CBR 7
CBR 8
CBR 9
CBR10 participant
CBR11 participant
CBR12 participant
CBR13 participant
CBR14 Participant
CBR14 Bingo Badges
CBR15 Participant
CBR16 Participant
CBR17 Participant
CBR17 Comments
CBR17 Levels

Good evening, everyone. I'm Leslie Monster, and this is Nightline. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: narfna's Quick Questions interview.)

narfna's Reviews:

I expected too much from this one.

Alphabet Squadron (Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron, #1) by Alexander Freed

by 2 Comments

I was disappointed in this one, considering how much I’ve enjoyed Freed’s other Star Wars stuff. Up until I read this book, I might have even told you he was the most talented Star Wars writer working today (Claudia Gray being a very close second). His Rogue One novelization was a piece of art. The short story he wrote for A Certain Point of View was extremely poignant. But Alphabet Squadron was just okay. There was really nothing special about it at all. Maybe I […]

“It’s easy to repeat; it’s hard to speak.”

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

by Leave a Comment

This was an intriguing and well-written book, but I just never seemed to connect with it the way I wanted to. Babel-17 was the last book of my classic sci-fi binge in February, and it was also my least favorite of the three I read (the other two were Way Station and The Stars My Destination). Although, in another headspace, and maybe if I hadn’t had to do the Kindle version (because free) I might have been able to concentrate more and liked it better. […]

“And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.”

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

by Leave a Comment

I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. “Golden Age Sci-Fi” isn’t always something that personally resonates with me. A lot of it is very dated, or rooted in the time period it was written in, or focuses on ideas and themes that aren’t as interesting to me as more modern sci-fi. But this book feels almost timeless, and though I don’t usually care about the prose of a book as much as I do its ability to make me care for […]

I thought this one was better than the first.

The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut, #2) by Mary Robinette Kowal

by Leave a Comment

So I never actually wrote a review of the first book in this series. I review-amnestied it late last year, in the 40+ reviews I just gave up on because I let my review backlog get Out Of Control. We read this for my IRL book club, and we were all excited to read about lady astronauts doing science and winning against misogyny, but all of us had very mixed feelings about it. I flew through the book, but also had problems with it at […]

“Gully Foyle is my name, and Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, and death’s my destination.”

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

by Leave a Comment

I did a little mini-binge of classic sf books at the end of February, and this one (which I’ve owned in audio for ages) was the first up. It’s also the one I’m the least sure about. The Stars My Destination is considered one of the most important works of sf, and Bester is nearly always mentioned in talks about the masters of the genre. This was the first book I’ve read by him, and his most well-known (although his other well-known book, The Demolished […]

A space action romance that has me looking forward to book two.

Polaris Rising (The Consortium Rebellion, #1) by Jessie Mihalik

by 6 Comments

I actually liked the plot and the world better than the romance, so, not my fave there. (Alphaholes are not my thing at all.) But I still liked it! This series takes place in the future, an unspecified amount of time from now, in which the Earth was rendered uninhabitable, and the governing of human society has evolved into a Consortium of three powerful families who rule absolutely (and have retaken Earth for rich people, by invitation only). There are spaceships and faster-than-light travel, advanced […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo