Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If you had 450 years to plan a welcome party…

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

by Leave a Comment

*some spoilers ahead* If you, like me, had never heard of this book until Netflix aired the eponymous series, it’s ok. Sometimes we watch the movie/tv show/whatever and then read the book, even though it feels weird. Three-Body Problem is a concept in classical mechanics that describes the motion of three masses that orbit each other in space. The problem is that there is no solution to always accurately describe their motion (thanks wikipedia). So now imagine there is a planet, called Trisolaris, with three […]

Et al

To Hold up the Sky by Cixin Liu

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry

Dance to the Music of Time: The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell

Dance to the Music of Time: The Soldier's Art by Anthony Powell

Dance to the Music of Time: The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

by Leave a Comment

To Hold up the Sky – 3/5 I really like the Cixin Liu novels I’ve read, and have felt that the short story collections are a mixed bag. The issue tends to be a lack of closing confidence. There’s also some cool premises, and some interesting premises explored in strange ways.  The opening story “The Village Teacher” splits the narrative between a simple country teacher and an intergalactic war, and the way in which these get resolved is really interesting.  Another story takes a huge […]

Grab Bag

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascensia

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

Mountain by Cixin Liu

The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakmi

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson

Homecoming by Eddie Huang

The Matchlock Rifle by Walter Edmonds

Two Logs Crossing by Walter Edmonds

Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

by Leave a Comment

Mortality – 4/5 Stars This is a partial memoir and final notes first published by Vanity Fair and then in book form from the final days of Christopher Hitchens. There’s a part in the middle of every thing where someone tells Hitchens something like “God works in mysterious ways” and Hitchens wonders what is so mysterious about a heavy smoker getting advanced lung cancer. That’s the basic idea here. First things first, it’s not secret that Hitchens is a bit of a bugbear, and for […]

Most unique ‘First Contact’ sci-fi I have ever read

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Ken Liu (translator)

by 1 Comment

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair.  To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.  This thought determined the entire direction of Ye’s life. The Three-Body Problem has been on my TBR list for years.  It was on many best of lists when published in English and my husband loved it.  Unfortunately, the first time I tried to […]

The brown ant had already forgotten its home.

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

by Leave a Comment

The second novel in the Cixin Liu series about Earth’s Past series which began with The Third Body Problem. This novel is great, and it’s a great follow up to the first novel. For one, it’s a branching off the good work of the first novel while also needing to be vastly different because of the ways in the which the narrative had shifted by the end of the first novel. Knowing that an invading alien force is coming for the Earth, but not for […]

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy – well, books 2 and 3

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Death's End by Cixin Liu

by 1 Comment

The first book in the series, The Three-Body Problem, is one of the most popular books in Chinese according to wikipedia.  The Three-Body Problem was the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for best novel.  I read it at the end of last year and waited a few months for the next two to become available.  I was able to listen to books 2 and 3 back-to-back which was really nice. So this trilogy is science fiction, but what I would consider hard-SF. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo