Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Blackbird swearing in the dead of night

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

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What a strange book.  That’s not an insult coming from me, but I think this book suffers from a surfeit of ideas; Anders has A LOT to say here about the intersection of and battle between science and nature, and it all comes out in a book that’s not quite big enough to contain them all, which was the problem I had with her most recent novel that I read earlier this year. Like with that one, there are worse things than too many ideas, […]

Own Voices

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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  This is my Bingo choice for Own Voices and it’s simultaneously a great one and a terrible one in that it is a fictional book written by a transgender lesbian author about the struggles of changing one’s body to reflect a changing understanding of ones self, and the love the protagonist has for her same-sex roommate.  Perfect, right? The body she’s changing into is a non-human one, not because she has never felt at home with herself, but because their telepathic hormonal communication works […]

2018 – I Can’t Quit You

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This last year, like many Cannonballers, I read more books than I got a chance to review and so this final review of 2018, which will end up being my first review of 2019, is a sort of odds and ends.  Here in no particular order are books that I read while in China, books I read while on vacation in Northern Wisconsin, and books I read during my fall and spring semesters that I just didn’t have time to write about at the time. […]

I did not enjoy it.

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And I’m pretty bummed about it. I wanted to like it. I liked the first half, in which nerd genius Laurence and young witch Patricia meet in middle school and become half-assed friends. I liked its many, many beautiful lines. I liked young Patricia and to a small degree, adult Patricia. I liked that it was a book by a trans woman that got mainstream attention without her trans-ness being the reason. I liked the cover art. I liked that a nonbinary character who used […]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I’ve been dreading writing this review. I just don’t know what to say about this book, because I don’t really know how I feel about it, still, and it’s been months since I finished it. Ultimately, I just don’t think this was the book for me, but that kind of thing doesn’t fill up a review space. It’s also not helpful to anyone reading this review, because only people who pay extremely close attention to my reading habits might have a clue what a “for me” […]

Meh, At Least It’s Short!

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I read this both because my book club assigned it for the month of April and also because I am a Hugo voter and got a free copy of it in the voting packet.  I was familiar with Anders’ work, mostly essays and some short stories, and thought this book sounded really interesting from the description.  It was a combination of magic and science, takes place in the SF Bay Area, about modern life with fantastical elements.  Sign me up! But this book kind of […]



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