Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The devil went down to Moscow

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

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This was my first ‘Russian master’ novel, and without having read any others, I am here to tell you: start with this one: it was so.much.fun! (Cbr13bingo Gateway square). These are things I feel like I have heard no one ever utter about War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and so I feel like if you’re going to start somewhere, it should be somewhere fun. The Master and Margarita is like a Eugene Ionesco absurdist play in novel form, with the focus on Stalinist Russia. […]

My Entrypoint for Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

The Mountains of Mourning by Vorkosigan Saga

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So a bit of re-reading was rquired here before I could write this one up. I am a huge fan of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Huge. And I am not the only one here. So as someone who is a big fan, I’m usually pretty eager to reccomend the series to other people. And this is where I sort of run into a problem. Because the Vorkosigan Saga sort of has the same issue as the Discworld series. This is a long running series […]

What if you could blame everything bad on someone else?

Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

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Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow By Jessica Townsend   Morrigan Crow has the dubious distinction of being a Cursed Child (no, not the same one from the play.)  When a child is born on Eventide, they are said to be cursed, and are doomed to die on their eleventh birthday.  Everything bad that happens, be it a lost spelling bee or a spoiled batch of marmalade, is blamed on the local cursed child.  Morrigan’s father, a government official, sits down periodically with her and […]

Still not entirely sure what is going on in this story, but it’s an intriguing set-up

Paper Girls, vol 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

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3.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Gateway It’s just after Halloween 1988, and four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls have a very unusual night, full of surprises, peril, and unexpected occurrences. I went into Paper Girls knowing literally nothing about it except that it was written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, both artists whose work I’ve liked in the past. Did I know it was set in the late 1980s? Nope. Did I know the protagonists were pre-teens? Big old no. Had I given […]

Gateway to Science Fiction and Octavia Butler

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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Cbr13bingo Gateway, Bingo #9-11 (horizontal, vertical and inner square) Parable of the Sower (1993) is an astoundingly prescient work of science fiction. Octavia Butler (1947-2006), winner of Nebula, Hugo and MacArthur prizes, tells the story of hyperempath Lauren Olamina in mid-2020s California. I reviewed this novel for the 2015 Cannonball Read, and I do believe that it (or really any written by Butler) would be a Gateway to reading more sci-fi/fantasy, and I hope a Gateway to reading more by Butler. Butler writes powerfully and […]

Another story I didn’t know existed, a perfect author for the Gateway square

A Good Heretic (Wayfarers #0.5) by Becky Chambers

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There are a handful of authors that I am simply delighted Cannonball Read has put on my reading radar. Becky Chambers is absolutely one of those. Her The Wayfarers series helped to cement for me my enjoyment of space based science fiction, while simultaneously reaffirming that one doesn’t need to rely on the hero’s journey in order to write excellent genre fiction. My favorite genre books are all character driven, and that is just the kind of exploration and survival stories at which Chambers excels. […]



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