Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

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I absolutely devoured Doomsday Book a few weeks ago in a matter of days, which at 600 pages, was a relatively fast pace. This book, 500 pages, similar in its conceit took me longer in terms of days and a lot longer in terms of energy spent. I languished with this one at times, and while I sometimes run cold with Willis, I was hoping for a similar set of reactions to the previous novel of hers that I read. So the conceit here is […]

“You can’t go back,” Gilchrist said. “Haven’t you heard? We’re under quarantine, thanks to Mr. Dunworthy’s carelessness.”

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

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This is one of the first books in a very long time that I considered staying up well past my bedtime to continue reading, almost any of the given nights I was reading this. Usually I am very happy to settle down at my normal time without reading on. I tried reading this years ago and the mass market edition of the book was just too much. So if you don’t know about the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis — which includes this […]

I looked that up one day in February, the day I went out to see where Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie was buried.

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis

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I feel like maybe this is a fairly lost Connie Willis novel, where her career has been so defined by the infinite numbers of Hugo and Nebula Awards she has won, and of course the sheer heft and size of her large and longer novels. But I liked this one. It’s better than the other early short novels she wrote in the mid 1980s by a wide margin I feel. It also just happens to coincide with my growing up and current life in some […]

Too Much to Say About the Cat

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

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To Say Nothing of the Dog is not for those with short-attention spans. Though it eventually finds its way and becomes an absorbing, rollicking time travel story, the road there is bumpy and, even worse, frustratingly slow and irritating. For about 150 pages, almost a third of the book, Willis putters around with her narrative, allowing characters to waste time on sitcom-level miscommunications and incompetent decision-making. The book makes an impressive recovery, which explains and also justifies the high esteem it is held in among […]

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

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The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]

Crosstalk irritates almost as much as having telepathy would

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Does anyone else feel guilty giving bad reviews? This is the first actually bad review I’ll make for CBR and I feel strangely guilty. Anyway, with that over with: I thought this book sucked. I mean it just plain sucked (I’m channelling Homer Simpson here). Meant to be a satire examining overcommunication, technological obsession, the constant connectedness of modern society, AND romance and sci-fi novels, the book overshoots and manages to be mostly a satire of itself instead. On top of that, it’s also just […]



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