Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Dawn – An intriguing take on human-alien interactions

Dawn by Octavia Butler

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I first read the Xenogenesis saga of Octavia Butler when I was a teenager and it arrived with a ton of other books I ordered from some science fiction book club (I had just gotten a job and was a dumb kid, don’t judge). What I remembered most from the initial read was the use of cancer cells by the alien race, the Oankali, to reshape their own bodies which I thought was a brilliant concept (actually still think it is brilliant). Maybe I did […]

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

The Seeds by Ann Nocenti

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The Seeds is WARPED!  I was reading it a few nights ago and texting to a friend about it. I told them at that point (a handful of pages in), we had destroyed Earth to the point where much of the population has left the technology side of the city and gone “back to basics.” Yet, this is no lovefest, happy back-to-nature world. Just lie the technology side is just horrible as any dystopian world could be, it is pig-eat-pig world out there. On the […]

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 […]

“from the housetops to the gutters – from the ocean to the shore -the warning signs have all been bright and garish -far too great in number to ignore”

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

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The children have a game: keep their parental status secret. If they keep it secret from each other, they can keep it secret from themselves. They won’t have to be the “children of” anyone. They don’t have to claim allegiance with the drunks in the Great House who let the world burn. Their game, and much of this book in general, brought to mind strong memories of “Old College Try” by The Mountain Goats. A Children’s Bible is more than what it seems. It’s presented […]

DUNE

Dune by Frank Herbert

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  This is a difficult book to write a summary for. It’s been around for nearly 60 years, has been adapted multiple times already, has another adaptation coming out this year, and yet before first reading it in 2013, I had no idea what it was about. So what kind of scope do you give a synopsis for something like this? I really don’t know. Also the last time I wrote more than 100 words at a time was many years ago so excuse the […]

A post-apocalyptic Irish Frankenstein tale

Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin

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In her post-apocalyptic debut novel, Sarah Maria Griffin never lets you forget that her protagonist, Nell Crane, is running out of time. The ticking of Nell’s mechanical heart never lets her forget, either: she is coming up on her twenty-first birthday and must present a “contribution” to her community in the Pale (the shattered remnants of Dublin), go to the Pasture where her Nan presides like a priestess, or become one of the workers on the colossal statue of Kathleen ni Houlihan (also called Kate), […]



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