Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Three five-star books in a row; what are the odds? (Nm don’t tell me the odds.)

City of Blades (The Great Cities, #2) by Robert Jackson Bennett

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“Not one war, she realizes—every war, all wars ever fought by humanity. Never one side prevailing over the other, never separate and disparate groups, but a blazing, monstrous act of self-mutilation, as if humanity itself was cutting open its own belly to send its intestines spilling into its lap. The sword speaks to her: Are you these things? Is this you?” This series continues to be so good, and in such unexpected ways. It’s just so rich in basically every way a story can be rich: in […]

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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I did not expect to love this book so much, but it really hit me pretty hard. I liked Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut just fine, it was fun, and I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but I didn’t connect to it emotionally like I did God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Near the beginning of the book, there’s a moment when Eliot Rosewater is thinking about Vonnegut’s stand-in writer character, Kilgore Trout, who is Eliot’s favorite author (see quote below, which also applies to sci-fi and fantasy […]

The book that inspired the Metallica video that freaked you the hell out in 1988

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CBR 10 Bingo: Fahrenheit 451! (banned and challenged books) There’s no shortage of books that have been turned into movies, but relatively few have been turned into music videos by heavy metal bands. To be more accurate, the 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun, which was itself inspired by the true story of a Canadian soldier brutally injured in World War I, inspired a 1971 film by the same name, which inspired the Metallica song “One,” whose video features cuts from the film. Coincidentally, the book was […]



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