Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I will live, thought Saul Laski.

Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons

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This is a behemoth of a horror novel by Dan Simmons, enjoying a little renaissance right now as the creator of The Terror and he’s a bit of a genre-jumping writer working in horror, science fiction, historical fiction (usually with a twist), and mystery. This novel starts in a concentration camp during WWII when we meet Saul Lasky, a Polish Jew, confronting his greatest terror, a Nazi commandant her refers to as The Oberst. We then jump shockingly and jarringly into the first person narration of […]

If Uncle Stevie’s name is on it, odds are I’m going to read it.

Flight or Fright by Stephen King, Bev Vincent

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CBR11bingo #TheCollection Its no secret that I am not a huge fan of flying. I understand that it is the safest way to travel. But I usually choose to drive if I can. I like to be able to choose my own route, to leave when I want to leave, to stop when I want to stop. I like to be in control of my journey. I think the lack of that control in an airplane is part of what makes me uneasy. Oh, and […]

It’s been a long time since I was this disappointed in a book

The Abominable by Dan Simmons

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This review contains spoilers, so if you want to save The Abominable for yourself, you’re not going to want to read what follows. . . . . Not too long ago, I read and loved The Terror which was a delicious mix of history and fiction, spiced up with a little supernatural to make a truly compelling book set in a place I love reading about. I thought that The Abominable would do for climbing Everest what The Terror did for Artic exploration. On this […]

The implacable horror of isolation

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There are books that speak to you. Books that reach down into the core of your inner being to play the delicate chords of your heart strings. Books that stay with you, becoming a passenger for life, indelibly connecting you to a particular place and time, like some kind of existential anchor of permanence in a sea of change. Moby Dick is one such book, for me. That book haunts me. It’s the girl I had a crush on in high school but was too afraid […]

And the ending resembles a fart

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Hyperion is a very, very good book. The sequel might have been equally good if Dan Simmons would have not whiffed the ending. It so lacks in imagination that it made me angry. But let start at the top. Disappointments all around We left our band of intrepid pilgrims before they stepped down into the Valley of the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. They expected to meet the Shrike and die, except for one who – according to legend – would be offered a […]

This is only the beginning

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This is another classic science-fiction novel, and the one with which I started my ‘quest’ for an expanded horizon in literature. Because I recently acquired The Fall of Hyperion, I felt that I had to re-read the first book of the Hyperion Cantos. It was worth it. Not only had I mostly forgotten the plot, the book is a joy to read, even if is unusually structured. Step out into the galaxy Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos is set in the 28th century. Mankind has expanded […]



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