Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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vel veeter's Reviews:

Mars was empty before we came.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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So this is the first novel in a series of three novels and a collection of short stories. The novels get progressively longer and this one already clocks in at 575 pages. So all told the series comprises about 2000 pages. The novel is an expansive granular-level investigation into a Mars colonization project which would start this current decade and one of the central figures of the project is my age — I mean literally — in that he was born in 1982 (I was […]

The Phurnicite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around.

Among Others by Jo Walton

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This is a really wonderful novel. It’s kind of weird mix of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, Matilda by Roald Dahl, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This weird combination is never all of one plus, but a blending of elements of each. Morwenna is 14 and has either just survived a horrendous car crash that killed her mother and sister, or conversely, she and her sister worked together using their shared magic to stop their mother from taking over the world of men via the […]

If a man walks in dressed like a hick and walking around as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

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This is a novel about doubles, but more specifically this is a novel about an actor who gets hired to replace a dying and/or incapacitated politician. It takes place mostly on Mars, which led me to wonder if this is the same Mars of Stranger in a Strange Land, but mostly I was thinking about how much I didn’t care that much about the politics of the world. If the plot sounds familiar, it is. This book is basically Dave, at least in the broad strokes. And it’s […]

“Don’t go, Bobby,” said my friend.

Song of Kali by Dan Simmons

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This is a horror novel that when it gets right down to it is pretty scary because of how subtle the actual terrifying moments of it are. It’s very much like being in a black room and a tiny amount of light slightly unveils the horrors in the room and even if your image of them are unclear and the immediate danger isn’t fully realized, it’s all the scarier. In addition, the mix of real world scary and fantasy scary intermix in convincing ways. The […]

I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided.

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

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There’s been a handful of critics I’ve read through the years who’ve put out works like this. Early American criticism almost universally looked like this, and the appeal must be quite alluring for iconic critics who both do and don’t specialize. This is a collection of essays — 5 to 10 pages each — in a literary and cultural touchstone kind of way. James avowedly tells us from the beginning he is not looking for a universal understanding of “Western” writers, and he has not […]

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

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Written in exile, this children’s novel acts as an allegory, it seems clear, about the power of voice, the importance of stories, and the dangers and cruelties of censorship. The story involves Haroun, the son of a city’s official storyteller who has lost his voice. He begins to wonder how and why stories are losing their power, their prevalence, and their creativity and originality. He begins a journey to a neighboring kingdom to seek the source of these losses and finds a nefarious plot by […]



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