Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I don’t know how a novel with a mechanical octopus could go so wrong

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR 14 BINGO: Time, because there is a watch on the cover, and a watch in the title, and it deals with the way a person’s possible futures can shift through time Note: I’ve included spoilers to explain what it was that I didn’t like about this novel. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street has all the ingredients required to create something I should love: interesting characters, a non-linear interpretation of time, steampunk-esque mechanics, a beautiful cover, a dash of feminism, and an anthropomorphic clockwork octopus. […]

Murder near the Nile

DIsappearance of a Scribe by Dana Stabenow

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Bingo 4: New Before I saw Disappearance of a Scribe in the library, I had heard of neither The Eye of Isis series nor its author Dana Stabenow. This is both a new to me series and author; it turns out this is actually book 2 of the series, but it seems pretty stand alone as well. What we’ve got is detective fiction in a historical fiction setting. Due circumstances from the previous book which we mostly don’t need to know, Tetisheri has become the […]

Times are changing and not for the better

Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

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CBR Bingo 3: Time Shorefall is the middle part of a trilogy and you can definitely tell; everything goes from bad to worse for nearly everyone, good and bad. The time element actually has several applications here: first, there’s a race against time as the good guys Sancia, Gregor, Orso, and Berenice try to stop the return of first hierophant Crasedes who is probably mega-evil, and when that doesn’t work, they discover Crasedes might be able to use scriving to manipulate time, or he’s somehow […]

Adaptation in a time of Revolution

A gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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This was my IRL book club’s choice for our July meeting.  At some point in June, the book was bought, but it was not on my Kindle.  I had not read it until yesterday when i realised i had a week to do so, and apparently it is long. I finished it in an afternoon. It also fits into the CBR bingo space of adaptation (camel). It is the story of Count Alexsander Rostov, who returned to Russia in 1918 from Paris, ensured his grandmother […]

“This – not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture – is my inheritance: the inexplicable need and extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.”

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

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On 2022’s Read Harder Challenge Task 6 is to read a non-fiction YA comic. Each year when the Read Harder tasks are unveiled, I go through my over 600 book deep to read list on Goodreads looking for books to fulfill each task. I knew this one would be difficult, there just isn’t much in the way of non-fiction graphic works on my TBR, which is an area I could do to grow in (thus, doing this reading challenge each year since 2015). I was […]

“a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul”

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

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CBR Bingo: Minds Confession first: I’ve had this book kicking around on my shelves–a signed copy, no less!–since 2016, when Sebastian Barry came to give a reading at my grad school institution, an event timed to coincide with the centenary of the Easter Rising. (Small brag: I got to have barbecue with him and historian Roy Foster, along with my dissertation director and a couple other grad students. He was very nice, and when visiting American cities he likes to see what he can find […]



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