Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Well that was unexpected….

Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

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I know Primo Levi primarily from his personal narratives. He is an Auschwitz survivor, and many of his most famous writings relate his various experiences during that time. Some of his other writings discuss his work as a chemist or his brief stint in the Italian army before the war. This collection of short stories began in a similar vein. The very first story is about a captured Italian partisan who has the opportunity to set of a opportunistically positioned German grenade. As I was […]

I Hate Writing Titles

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This review is for the audiobook version of The Drafter, by Kim Harrison. It’s the first in a new sci-fi series. Peri Reed is a drafter for the government, a person with the ability to turn back time to fix mistakes. For every second she goes back, part of her past is erased. To offset this all drafters are paired with anchors, people who can experience multiple timelines and sort between them, able to fill in the gaps after a draft. But what happens when […]

If you loved the movie, you need to read this.

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If you’ve read any reviews of this book, what I’m about to say is probably something you’ve heard before: This is one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read, if not the best. Oy, that sounds really hyperbolic, and to be fair, it’s really not a high bar to clear. People aren’t going around screaming for the next great novelization. They just aren’t. Also, the novelization for The Force Awakens was quite terrible, so psychologically speaking, pretty much if this one had been halfway decent I […]

Humans still struggling to learn empathy in 25th century

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This one was a friend recommendation as well as a start to my quest for more women-written science fiction, and it did not disappoint. Cat is a psion, a “freak” born of the socially forbidden union between a human and a Hydran, a race of telepathic aliens who have been exterminated by humans. His telepathic powers make him feared and hated, even though a past trauma has left him unable to access his psion abilities. He is recruited/coerced/blackmailed into taking a job as a glorified […]

“There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin.”

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I remember reading this back in middle school, but I don’t remember it being quite so long, so maybe we didn’t read a different version? I liked it at the time though, and it definitely holds up well (especially considering it was written in 1959 — you’d probably never guess). “How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibilty, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man with […]

“When the end came, it was beautiful.”

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“When you got right down to it, humans were still just curious monkeys. They still had to poke everything they found with a stick to see what it did.” I have to admit that I get intimidated by science fiction.  I’m worried that it will go over my head and I won’t get it.  Not that I don’t enjoy sci fi–I do!  But I’ve always leaned more in the direction of fantasy, feeling that sci fi was outside of my comfort zone.  I’ve been slowly […]



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