Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Suddenly, he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty…

The Complete Stories of JG Ballard by JG Ballard

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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to talk about 98 short stories written over 40 years. But this was an interesting and exhausting reading experience. There’s a lot going on here. So to begin at the beginning, JG Ballard was a British science fiction writer, known mostly to me via the 1995 David Cronenberg movie Crash and the Stephen Spielberg’s movie Empire of the Sun. A few years ago I saw the trailer for High Rise and was blown away. The movie itself is not […]

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

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The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]

The Audiobook is Amazing!

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One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak My rating: 4 of 5 stars “One More Thing” by B.J. Novak is a funny, dark, cynical, deep, well-written collection of short stories. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook because several famous comedians/celebrities and Novak himself read the stories. While there’s a grab bag of different tones throughout the stories, there’s several stories that have a real grit to them. While sometimes this grit is housed in some absurd scenarios, there’s no mistaking that […]

What Happens When We Finally Colonize Mars

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The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury was originally written as separate short stories. After being submitted to his publisher, the publisher told Bradbury to connect the short stories into a cohesive collection about the planet Mars and its subsequent colonization of the planet. Each year I teach “There Will Come Soft Rain” by Bradbury and until reading “The Martian Chronicles” I had no idea the two were related. Granted, the inclusion of “Soft […]

Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor

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Another book from my list of 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 was The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros. I did not realize this until I had actually finished Mango Street, but I’d already read Caramelo by Cisneros years ago and enjoyed it. I like repeating authors when I appreciate their writing, and I was again impressed by Cisneros’s writing and perspective with this book. However, I was always looking for more detail, and I often felt left behind and looking for more. The House […]

Murderbot is the depressed and anxious android you’ve always needed. (CBR10 Bingo 10 & 11)

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Bless Cannonball Read, praise be for friends who you know share a similar taste in books, and let the world rejoice for Murderbot. Because November is a busy time here at Cannonball Read (I still have half the assignment emails for Book Exchange to send out) I’ll be using a slightly modified plot summary from Goodreads: In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are (required to be) accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own […]



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