Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“into every life a little poop must fall”

If It Bleeds by Stephen King

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There’s something about reading Stephen King that really fuels my creativity. And this was a good collection. The real star of these four novellas is the titular If It Bleeds, a direct sequel to The Outsider, but I think I might have actually liked it better than that book. We get some classic themes from Uncle Stevie here but he adds a modern spin to most of them that was interesting, even if some worked better than others for me. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone — 3.5 […]

An intriguing but ultimately disappointing take on aliens coming to Earth

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

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This was such a cool idea! Aliens land in the ocean outside Lagos, and basically start granting wishes to sea creatures. This swordfish wants to be enormous? Done. This eel thing wants to be able to fly? Done. Then the aliens come ashore and are basically like “Yo, earthlings, we’re here, we plan to stay, there’s nothing you can do about it, hi!” No nefarious plots, no interstellar war, no kidnapping humans for experiments. The main alien ambassador chooses three humans to be her representatives, […]

If Start Trek Got Blah and Some Part of it Knew That

Red Shirts by John Scalzi

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Bingo Review 17: Red Red Shirts (‘red’ is in the title, and occasionally referenced in-text) is basically Star Trek gone meta, really meta. I would divide the story into two parts: the part where certain members of the crew of the Intrepid start to notice some strange patterns surrounding the away missions: certain crew members always are fine (relatively) while certain others are nearly guaranteed to end up dead. But why is that? Ensign Dahl is the driving force behind trying to solve this strange […]

Writing time travel is hard, but it shouldn’t be this hard to read

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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Ya’ll. This was not was for me. This book has been well loved by Cannonballers. It’s won the Nebula and the Locus awards. And I get why! The storytelling style is unique, the narrative is interesting. This book has style for daaaaays. But oh my lord I was bored to tears, which is a special accomplishment for a novella. Plot: The plot, frankly, doesn’t really matter. You have two opposing shadowy organizations fighting for domination of the world by strategically travelling through time and causing […]

“There must have been some kind of mistake,” I said.

The End and Other Beginnings by Veronica Roth

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In terms of the books she’ll write in her career, Veronica Roth couldn’t have done herself a bigger favor than writing the Divergent series first. I will go on record to say they are truly and utterly terrible. Not only do they tap into that post Hunger Games market in ways that I do believe Roth wrote earnestly (as opposed to a cynical cash grab that I DO blame her publishing company for putting), so they made a ton of money, but it also sets […]

Egypt has been called The Gift of the Nile.

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy

Far From Home by Walter Tevis

Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

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CBR12Bingo – Shelfie These three books are not connected in any meaningful way except that I happened to buy all of them earlier in the summer from Thriftbooks and randomly chose to read them at the same time, switching off for a few reasons. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes ended up being a little more boring and dense that I had hoped, so the balance of the Walter Tevis stories helped, and while I really enjoy the Will Cuppy pieces, they are too similar to one another to […]



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