Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When the movie is made, I hope they get Abbi Jacobsen (Broad City) to star.

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong

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I can’t stress how much I loved this book. In many ways, it serves as a companion to Ready Player One. It follows Zoe Ashe from a life of poverty in a suburban trailer park through a terrifying hunt to an inheritance she didn’t know awaited her. It has the same basic plot as the aforementioned book (which I reviewed earlier in the year), but diverges in a number of distinct ways. For starters, the protagonist here is a woman. I don’t think that’s a […]

A truly stunning sci-fi book for the ages

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Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]

I Hope Those are the Kinds of Lasers that Slice People in Half

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I was very hesitant to pick up another Stephenson book.  I read Diamond Age and was underwhelmed.  And, my copy of Snow Crash came with a cover blurb comparing the story to Neuromancer, which was a book that almost made me feel physical pain trying to read through it.  So I didn’t have high hopes for Snow Crash, but I wanted to cross another title off the of NPR’s 100 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy list. Little did I know that snow Crash would become […]

Addams and Eves against mankind?

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The second book in Atwood’s Madd Addam trilogy traces members of a group called God’s Gardeners both before and after “The Great Waterless Flood,” i.e., the pandemic that destroyed mankind. The chapters bounce around to the different characters, years before the pandemic, and show their previous lives leading up to the destruction. The first novel followed Jimmy in his life in the compound, but these characters are the other half, the less privileged from the pleeblands. But as time goes on, connections between these two […]

An Austen retelling that’s actually good

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Scootsa1000 put this book in the same category as Clueless and Bridget Jones in her recent review of Jane (a retelling of Jane Eyre) and I immediately checked to see if my library had it. Because a good dystopian retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion? So here for that. Luckily my library had it in stock and I was able to immediately dive right in. The world Elliot North and Malakai Wentforth live in is recovering from something they call the reduction. Basically genetic engineering and […]

Rakunks and pigoons and wolvogs oh my!

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I have an arbitrary list I revise every year of things I want to do for the year.  It isn’t new years resolutions because I typically recreate it in October/November, and there are specific things, local places to visit, foods to try, versus platitudes.  It isn’t exactly a bucket list because I think the term “bucket list” is stupid.  I settled on calling it my “dream board” tongue-in-cheekily for lack of better terminology.  To make a long story short (too late) because of the Goodreads […]



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