Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Death is the only thing keeping us in line.

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

by Leave a Comment

I read Drew Magary’s The Hike a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised by how detailed, rich, and more than anything how funny it was. It felt very tacked together for the most of the first half or so, like he was making it up as he went along, but toward the end it felt more and more structured.    But with this novel, I was worried that because the concept was so conceit driven, ala a Twilight Zone episode or something like that […]

Guatemalan insanity pepper: The Book

The Hike by Drew Magary

by 1 Comment

You guys, Magary has been hiding the good drugs. This book was TRIPPY.  In more ways than one it reminded me of “El viaje misterioso de nuestro Jomer,” The Simpsons episode where Homer hallucinates a coyote instructing him to journey to find his soulmate, but there’s a bit of Twilight Zone twistiness and, yeah, Chuck Palahniuk darkness. I’m impressed a book this weird was conceived, written to book length, edited, and published.  The weirdness was highlighted for me having gone into it blind on the strength […]

It’s a fact that every minute you hold a child, it triples in mass.

Someone Could Get Hurt by Drew Magary

by 2 Comments

Hi! This is my first Cannonball book. I hope it doesn’t suck and isn’t all about me, but humor me and let me start briefly from that standpoint: I’m a Drew Magary fan. Of his posts from Deadspin.  I even listen to the Deadcast podcast because he hosts it and his frat boy like dulcet tones put me to a contented sleep.  I think he’s funny. (I think he’s funny?!  Oh goodness, this is going to be a review as if Ron Swanson wrote it.) I’ve never […]

All that’s left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.

by 9 Comments

There’s a lot to admire in Drew Magary’s debut novel, The Postmortal. The plot is fascinating: what if, this year, scientists could discover the cure for aging? What if you could get a series of shots that would guarantee that you would never age a day — and would live for as long as you wanted, unless you died from a disease or an accident or an act of violence? Would you do it? If you did, what would it change about the way you […]

This was America. No One was Lost in America

by 3 Comments

The whole time I was listening to the audio version of Drew Magary’s The Hike, I wasn’t sure why I was listening, and yet I could not stop. It was a weird mix of my thing and so not my thing. When I was finished, I wasn’t sure what the point was, but weeks later, I’m still thinking about it. I was initially drawn to it because I remembered Scootsa1000’s review, and that she had really liked the crab. Funny. Surreal. Foul mouthed talking crab. […]

I was prepared to hate this…or worse….

by Leave a Comment

One thing I often don’t like about sci-fi/fantasy….or whatever you might this novel to be….is when the stakes are entirely fabricated/zone dependent. I mean by this that when there’s no real connection to something that is “real” and what’s happening in the novel, it’s some times hard to care too much about what’s going on the page. A version of this, where the stakes are invented, but turn incredibly satisfying is Dexter Palmer’s novel Version Control. A bad version of this might be like the movie Pacific […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo