Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Grief and Hope – the human experience

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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BINGO – New This is going to be a difficult book to summarize because I would not consider it a novel. It’s closer to a collection of short stories, but that’s not quite right either. It’s something in between. There’s a long form improv format in which the audience sees a scene with Person A and Person B. Something in that scene sparks an idea for a scene tangentially connected between Person B and Person C. Then a connected scene between Person C and D, […]

From the Plains of Texas to the Mountains of India

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

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The thing that I don’t think people who have not read Neal Stephenson understand about his writing is that it is pulpy and action packed. They see the size of a book like Termination Shock, read the description, and think—oh this is gonna be some heavy shit. And sure, he does go into multi-page digressions about whatever his current research obsession is, but that is also interspersed with plane crashes and people shooting boars out of helicopters. He starts Seven Eves with blowing up the […]

The nature of witches is to be self aware without follow through, apparently

The Nature of Witches by Rachel Griffin

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Witches are doing what they can to protect the climate and environment of the world, but non-witches continue to act in destructive ways. Extreme weather events are becoming more and more common, and the witches of the world don’t have enough power to keep everyone safe and return stability to the world because these extreme weather events are happening out of season: blizzards in summer, hurricanes in winter, tornados year round, etc. And since each witch is tied to the season they were born in, […]

“I saw the forest burn, when I was young.”

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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CBR13Bingo: Flora If this book does not win a ton of awards, I will be truly disappointed. Climate change science fiction (I’ve heard it called cli-fi but I’m not sold on that name) isn’t anything new, as evidenced by last year’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and N.K. Jemisin’s stellar “Emergency Skin.” But where this author truly excels is twisty plot and excellent characterization. Where most of those stories felt like far in the future scifi, this one felt in many ways startling immediate. “Our ancestors […]

I think this is the first pre-apocalypse book I’ve ever read

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

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CBR BINGO – Book Club Admittedly, I am getting a jump on this book club reading. My local bookstore, Brazos Bookstore, has chosen this book as it’s October book club selection and will be inviting author Lydia Millet to a virtual Q&A and discussion. This book was available at my library right before I was going on vacation for a week, so I had to snatch it up. Evie and her brother Jack are two kids out of many whose families vacation together each summer. […]

Whether we are or not

We are the Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer

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I went into this book having no knowledge of its topic, only a fondness for the author’s other work. It turns out, this was the author’s plan. It’s a delightfully written account of the dying earth and how we, the human race, are the leading cause of its death.  It’s a good mix of fact-based research and anecdotal evidence; it’s difficult to talk about this book without revealing its seedy underbelly. So in the interest of full disclosure: SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT: this book is […]



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