Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin

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Cannonball Read Square: Star I received this book as a gift for the Cannonball Read Book Exchange last year, so that alone bumped it up my to-read pile. I’ve gotten more into science fiction in the past few years, and I’m always excited to read from non-American viewpoints, so it was an obvious choice for me. I’m a sucker for award winners, and this book won the Hugo Award and Liu Cixin is the nine time (!) winner of China’s Galaxy Award and Ken Liu […]

After writing this, I learned we are still making breakthroughs in this field! 

Fever: How Tu Youyou Adapted Traditional Chinese Medicine to Find a Cure for Malaria by Darcy Pattinson

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Have you heard of Tu Youyou? She is a Chinese scientist who used traditional Chinese medicine to help cure malaria. And she was not from the 1800s or even early 20th century when we think of malaria research happening, but she was working during the late 1960s and 1970s in a People’s Republic of China task force. Therefore, relatively “new” in the grand picture. And not only did she and other scientists figure out the right ingredients, amounts, heat, and such, she was one of […]

New Rural Chinese Mystery Series!

Thief of Souls by Brian Klingborg

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Thief of Souls is the first book in the Inspector Lu Fei mystery series. I’m not sure how long the series is intended to go, but I know a second book was released earlier this year. In fact, Bookpage’s review of the newest installment is what had me track this one down at my local library. Inspector Lu Fei is a mid-level law enforcement agent for China’s Public Security Bureau (PSB). He lives and works in the rural agricultural town of Raven Valley. The reader […]

Don’t Go West

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James D. Bradley

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Like a lot of Americans, I learned the broad strokes about the Pacific theater in World War II. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Attacked us! Obviously, we couldn’t just stand pat. So we warred with them from island-to-island until we had no choice but to drop the atomic bomb and end the war. They were the aggressor and it was all their fault. I’m reluctant to call this narrative propaganda. Japan did attack us. But the history of the war in the Pacific […]

“Promise and potential:” Overlooked Vocational School Students in China

Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth by T.E. Woronov

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Stanford University Press was having an 80% off summer sale, which was an amazing deal, so I got a bunch of books that I otherwise would never have thought to purchase since academic press prices are usually prohibitively high. Class Work is the first of the batch that I’ve read, and it was a good start. This is a slim volume that packs a lot of information about the Chinese school system and the impact of testing and government efforts to make or re-mold class structures. […]

No One to Really Root For but It’s Still Somehow Pretty Good

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

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She Who Became the Sun definitely lived up to the hype; the characters are interesting and complex, and there is plenty of action and plot. What bothered me was that there was really only one character who stood up for general human decency, not just “I must take charge of my destiny no matter what I have to do (including murdering innocent people and not so innocent people)”. The basic premise is pretty well known already: in a quasi historical early medieval China, a nameless […]



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