Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A perfect example of what modern fantasy can do.

Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Loved this! Just a straight up great fantasy book right here. Great, unique worldbuilding. Loved the characters. Loved the exciting, heisty plot. Perfect build up to the next book. I just loved it, okay! I think I had this idea from just looking at the cover that this book was going to be kind of dark and dour, and it’s not at all. It’s clever and funny, and yes there are some darker places where the characters experience hardship, but it’s also just a really […]

“But How Do You Poop?”

Words of Radiance: Book 2 of the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson

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While a book titled Words of Radiance feels like its review title should be something much more lofty, “But how do you poop?” was one of my favorite lines in this book because it was so awesome and unexpected. Sanderson’s greatest feat in a series like this is that he and the characters don’t take themselves too seriously. Yes, there are gut-wrenching, serious, dark moments, but Sanderson balances that with a bouncy levity that’s borderline Pratchett in its honesty. At one point, Shallan asks one of the […]

Re-reading Mistborn, Era One – Part I: The Final Empire

Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1) by Brandon Sanderson

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This one is interesting to consider on re-read. I read it pretty early in my first journey through Sanderson’s work. It was the third, I think, after Elantris and The Way of Kings, and I wasn’t anywhere used to his shenanigans yet. It seems much tamer and less complex the second time around, especially since I’ve been swimming in the nonsense going on in the Stormlight Archive for four enormous books now (beautiful, wonderful nonsense). Parts of it were less interesting this time, and parts […]

Practicing What You Preach

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

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Okay, I said I was only doing writing non-fiction for Cannonball 13, but this epic fantasy is related to learning how to write. I took his 13-hour BYU writing class (on YouTube) and found it very informative. I decided I probably should read one of his books. Turns out Elantris is his first published work, and a good example of his classroom lessons. Elantris is an epic fantasy in every definition of the word. At over 600 pages, it follows the lives of three main […]

“Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.”

The Mad Ship (Liveship Traders, #2) by Robin Hobb

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This book does what it wants. I kept trying to read it faster than it wanted me to read it, and it took me twice as long as I thought it would. Not because it was bad, but because it was Too Much and I kept having to stop and process things. Also, sometimes when books stress me out I have to put them down because who knows what fool thing is going to happen next, and that was also going on here as well. […]

“We’re going to try something new.”

Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive, #4) by Brandon Sanderson

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What a wonderful book. I don’t know why I’m still surprised at this point at how good a book in this series turned out to be. I love all of these books, but there was something extra-wrenching about this one, as we really start to dig into not only the escalating mythology but the characters’ heads and hearts in ways that are only really possible because Sanderson has spent 3,500 pages before this providing the world’s most epic foundation. This is why I love epic […]



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