Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A labyrinth of isolation and connection

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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Piranesi live in the House. The House is expansive and full of many mysteries. Piranesi lives, for all intents and purposes, alone though the House is occupied by one other person, The Other. What mysteries does the House hold? What lessons is the House ready to teach? And that’s all I’ll say about the plot because the less you know going in, the better. When we are all isolating and distancing from others as much as we can (at least, I hope we all are), […]

Oh Murderbot, why did it take me so long to heed your call?

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

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Thank you again, Cannonballers, for alerting me to another treasure that would have stayed hidden from me had I not seen your many rave reviews!  I am a sucker for both “robot learns to person” and “people learn to robot” stories; I do not know why it took me so long to give Murderbot a go! Earlier this year I was awed by the beauty of A Closed and Common Orbit, but this time I was delighted by some good old-fashioned gruesome space violence. Our […]

THOUGHTS

Battle Ground (The Dresden Files, #17) by Jim Butcher

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I am going to do the opposite of what I did for Peace Talks for this book, which is I’m not going to write hardly anything, and only one thing will be under spoiler tags. If you have read the book, you know what that thing is. So, bullet points! I do not think either of these books was really served well by being split in two. I think they should have been one big book, and maybe cut like 100 pages from both. Maybe […]

less practical, more magical

The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

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Twenty two years after the publication of Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman fired up the ol’ Owens Family Cauldron to brew up (I apologize for NOTHING) the story of “The Aunts”. Before Jet and Franny were kooky caregivers with cupboards full of teeth and dove hearts, they were kids squirming under the overbearing but uninvolved eyes of their midcentury modern parents. Necessarily, when re-approaching a well-defined but of-its-time creation, one must get a little creative with facts and figures. Practical Magic was already a bit screwy with time, […]

A personal view of intersectional feminism, narrated by the author.

Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall

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This was a great audiobook. It was narrated by the author, and she has a really good reading voice. There were parts where her intonation changed in a weird way, but overall she narrates the book in a clear, strong voice, and with appropriate emotion. (Some authors try to read their own books, and it doesn’t work out so well for them.) This was an excellent book that focuses on the areas that “mainstream feminism”, aka middle class, mostly white, doesn’t take into account. Some […]

“What you get out of being loved, it’s supposed to be worth the compromise. When it’s good, it makes you want to compromise.” #CBRBingo – Yellow

Take a Hint, Dani Brown (The Brown Sisters, #2) by Talia Hibbert

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Yet another lovely book by Talia Hibbert, and again, upping to five stars because the audiobook version was so much fun to listen to. It’s hard for me to review books I just respond instinctually to. Something about it just clicked with me. I love Hibbert’s voice as a writer (she’s so funny!). I love the way she seems to so effortlessly create characters that come to life in my mind so easily, even the secondary and tertiary ones. I love the way that she […]



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