Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About narfna

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

narfna's Reviews:

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

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When I was looking at the 2022 Read Harder Challenge for the first time and saw #9: “Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest”, I knew without looking what that book would be, even though I haven’t looked at the beginning of my list in years. And that’s because I’ve been avoiding this book for as long as I’ve wanted to read it. Just one word for you: supervolcano. In Bryson’s signature breezy, humorous, yet intelligent style, he will explain to you […]

“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

by 2 Comments

I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

I learned so many Scandinavian swears!

Ship Wrecked (Spoiler Alert, #3) by Olivia Dade

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Ship Wrecked is the third and final book in Olivia Dade’s series about actors from a Game of Thrones-esque TV show finding love. This one follows co-stars Maria and Peter, who film alone on a small Irish island for six years, and build an intense bond. I continue to like not love this series, unfortunately. I’m hoping eventually I will wholeheartedly five-star love a book by Olivia Dade again (the only one so far is the excellent Teach Me) but it hasn’t happened. I suppose […]

“He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.”

The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4) by Maggie Stiefvater

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This was a very good series and I’m glad I read it. This final book is all the more impressive, knowing how sick the author was when writing it. It read sort of like a fever dream, and this series was already very dreamy. I did think The Moment we were all waiting for was completely anti-climactic, and the Glendower resolution was disappointing, but for me this series was not really about those things, but hanging out with these characters in their world and watching […]

“Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neurons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might be what make us worth saving.”

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

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This hit the spot. Sometimes you just need a book you can zoom through. Short chapters, intriguing and freaky plot, simple prose, high stakes. Blake Crouch always delivers. I think I like this book less than Dark Matter but more than Recursion. It helped that for once there were zero nuclear bombs present. This takes place in the near future, when genetic research and technology has been banned almost completely, excepting a few highly regulated government sponsored programs, due to a disaster caused by genetic […]

Wah :(

Fool's Quest (Fitz and the Fool, #2) by Robin Hobb

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“I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one’s breath before the next disaster.” Seriously, at this point—the middle book of a trilogy that is itself the penultimate book in a sixteen book epic saga of a series—it is virtually impossible to talk about anything in a review that won’t spoil SOMETHING, so […]



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