Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

As lovely as a book about imminent death can be

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera

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I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live. ― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End I guess I could call this energy freedom. No one will be around to judge me tomorrow. No one will […]

It’s a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation.

The Mountains of Mourning by Lois McMaster Bujold

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“These hill-folk are ignorant, lord.” “These hill-folk are mine, Pym. Their ignorance is…a shame upon my house. Their continued ignorance anyway,” he amended in fairness. It still made a burden like a mountain. “Is this message so complex? So difficult? ‘You don’t have to kill your children anymore.’ It’s not like we’re asking them all to learn–5-space navigational math.” That had been the plague of Miles’s last Academy semester. “It’s not easy for them,” shrugged Dea. “It’s easy for the central authorities to make the […]

One small step for a woman, a giant leap for all she inspired

To Boldly God, How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by Angela Dalton

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Once upon a time there was a little girl who watched a show called Star Trek. She had no idea what was going on and didn’t like the monsters/aliens. But when she became an adult and realized that an actor called Leonard Nimoy was playing the handsome character called Mr. Spock, she started to watch again. (I admit, it is all about the ears!) But as this more “worldly person” (she had gone to college, which was all of two hours away from her home […]

September 2023 Leftovers

Ex Machina, Book Five by Brian K. Vaughan

Windfall by Wendy Corsi Staub

The Big Bundle by Max Allan Collins

The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri

Guts and Genius: The Story of Three Unlikely Coaches Who Came to Dominate the NFL in the '80s by Bob Glauber

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Let’s please do something about climate change before it’s too late. I miss fall. And far more importantly: people’s lives are at stake. Ex Machina Book Five **** Mixed feelings on how this series ended. I think in many respects, the superhero stuff was handled better than the political angle through most of its run. That’s not something I thought I’d be saying after the first book. Making Mayor Hundred a contrarian centrist type was uninspired back then and comes off as even more annoying […]

Snapshots of a Spaceborn Few

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

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This one is slower than the first two novels in the Wayfarers series. We spend most of the book on the Asteria, one of the ships in the Exodan Fleet, following the characters of Tessa, a (often single) mother of two; Isabel, an Archivist; Eyas, a Caretaker (of the dead); Kip, a teen who just wants to leave the Fleet; and Sawyer, who wasn’t born in the Fleet but is looking for a different way of life. The timeframe for the novel is primarily set […]

Interspecies Connections as the “Wayfarers” Series Wraps Up

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

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Like the other Wayfarers novels, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is essentially a standalone novel, though readers of the other novels in the series will recognize the character Pei. She is one of the main characters this time, along with Roveg, a Quelin; Speaker, an Akarak; and Ouloo and her child Tupo, both Laru. The setting is the planet Gora, which is the Hanto word for “useless,” which I think made me laugh out loud upon reading that. It’s a planet that people stop […]



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