Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cuisine des Mémoires and other stories

How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

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LeVar Burton is a national treasure. As the originator of Reading Rainbow, Geordi LaForge on Star Trek TNG and the creator of one of my favorite podcasts, LeVar Burton Reads, I have spent a not insignificant amount of time with him, and for that I’m grateful to him. And now, I have to take it a step further because he introduced me to the amazing creativity of N.K. Jemisin. He first read “Playing Nice with God’s Bowling Ball” for a live event and interviewed Jemisin […]

Rise of the Vermin

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

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Bonnie reviewed this on here, it sounded very much relevant to my interests, so I ordered it and read it in one sitting. Don’t remember the last time I did this and to be fair, Cockroach is very short, but it still felt great to do this again. The book is Ian McEwan’s take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, except that instead of a young depressed man turning into a beetle, a cockroach turns into a powerful buffoon, namely the British Prime Minister. This Prime Minister – […]

The most effective collection of short stories I have ever read

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez

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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a collection of short stories by Mariana Enriquez. The stories are a mix of magical realism and outright horror. An Argentine writer, many stories take place in Argentina but a fair few also take place in Barcelona, Spain. Enriquez embues each story with a richness of their environment that make each story feel real and possible, despite the more horrific, fantastical elements. Most collections of shorts stories that I have read in my life are mostly fine. They […]

When the Bully is the Hero, the Girl is in love with a God and there are spaceships up your nose.

Animal Crackers by Gene Luen Yang

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Gene Luen Yang can write the instructions to how to make a sandwich and I would read it. That does not mean I will love it, but I will always appreciate it. And Animal Crackers is in that category. I was not jumping up and down about it, and even with a second reading (although a bit of a quick one) and being able to put together a few more pieces I missed the first time, I still did not love this graphic novel. This […]

Amazon’s Forward Collection is half-apocalyptic, half Black Mirror

Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

Ark by Veronica Roth

Rand0m1ze by Andy Weir

You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles

The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay

Summer Frost by Blake Crouch

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So I downloaded the 6 novellas that make up Amazon’s new Forward Collection, which appears to be a collection of sci-fi short stories by known authors (even though I have never anything by most of them). You can read them for free if you’re a Prime customer. I decided I will read them one each morning over a week and review them as I read them, but wait to post all reviews in one post. I will do it this way because these are short, and […]

More like an idling neutral, actually.

Full Throttle by Joe Hill

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Full Throttle is a collection of 13 (heh) short stories penned or co-authored by Stephen King’s spawn, who goes by ‘Joe Hill’ in an admiral attempt not to trade of his father (and mother’s) name. The stories within range from disappointing, to confusing, to middling, to verging on brilliant. It’s an uneven achievement and overall I found it disappointing. The quality of each story was so uneven, I’ve tackled a very brief review of each below… Full Throttle Hill’s answer to a modern retelling of […]



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