Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.”

Kraken by China Mieville

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Cannonball Read Bingo: Black This. book. has. everything.  Sentient tattoos, supernatural picket lines, spearguns, squid cults, invisible truffle pigs, and human origami. What’s human origami, you ask? It’s that thing of when you use magic to fit an adult man into a envelope and then send  him in the mail to one of your enemies. Kraken is a police procedural, and a horror novel, and a fantasy satire.  But mostly it’s about the end of the world. It follows the misadventures of Billy Harrow, a […]

I should have loved this but I didn’t…?

The Scar (New Crobuzon #2) by China Miéville

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The Scar is the second of the New Crobuzon series by China Mieville, but you certainly don’t need to read the first (Perdido Street Station) to understand or enjoy the second.  This is a long book with a lot going on!  Let’s do a quick summary. Bellis Coldwine, our complicated protagonist, is a professional translator on a ship from New Crobuzon voluntarily going into exile after the events of Perdido Street Station. Her plans immediately collapse as she finds herself “press-ganged” by pirates onto a […]

a thousand apologies and what feels like a thousand reviews (through November 2023)

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee

The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Kindred by Octavia E Butler

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hinumegin er mars by Sólrun Michelsen

Trust by Hernan Diaz

How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't by Ian Dunt

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It by Owen Jones

In the Beginning was the Sea by Tomás González

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

The City & the City by China Miéville

A History of Burning by Janika Oza

Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin

Passion Simple by Annie Ernaux

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

The Late Mrs. Willoughby by Claudia Gray

Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon

A Tempest at Sea by Sherry Thomas

Politics On the Edge: A Memoir From Within by Rory Stewart

Rivals by Katherine McGee

Reign by Katherine McGee

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

The Iliad by Homer, Emily Wilson

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

10 Things that Never Happened by Alexis Hall

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

A Dangerous Kind of Lady by Mia Vincy

A Little Life by Hanya Yanighara

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

The Starting Over Game by girl_with_kaleidoscope_eyes

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Edinburg by Alexander Chee CBR15: Sex True fact, when someone British asked me what I was reading I pronounced this “Edin-BERG” and to their credit they didn’t laugh but instead asked, with some horrified sincerity, if that’s how Americans say it. It’s not! At least, not on purpose. It’s just how can the English language claim to have been invented in a country that seems to not have grasped even a shred of understanding of how the various letters in it work? I digress. This is […]

Franz Kafka got together with Charles Dickens and wrote an episode of the X-Files based on Little Shop of Horrors

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

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CBR BINGO 14: Funky: Where Steampunk meets your nightmares “The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.” Those two sentences, from the second paragraph of Chapter 1 of Period Street Station, captivated me: the delicious smells of a bustling market intermingling with the filth […]

Once More Unto the Breach

The City and the City by China Mieville

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Tyador Borlu’s latest case is a real doozy. When a young woman’s body turns up in a local skate park, Inspector Borlu of the Beszel police leaps into action trying to pin down the witness’s stories and the woman’s identity, like he would on any other murder. But his efforts become more complicated when the woman turns out to be a resident of Ul Qoma, Beszel’s neighbor. Well… sort of. In Mieville’s preposterous high-concept premise, Beszel and Ul Qoma are not neighboring cities exactly, but […]

Odds and ends and ramblings

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I have never before hit my CBR goal and then just stopped, but 2020 has sapped my motivation and willpower and wordpower. So these aren’t real reviews, but I did want to do a brief round-up of some of the books I’ve finished recently, because one was SO GOOD I needed to add my voice to the chorus of praise, and because one was SO disappointing I needed to growl about it for a sec. So here’s my Cannonball Lightning Round:   So You Want […]



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