Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s not easy being green (CBR12Bingo 2: Green)

Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Foer

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” I can’t believe how much we have in common. We’re both studying the environment, we’re both utterly humorless about our vegetarianism, and we both love the Rolling Stones. Yes, not For their music, but for their tireless efforts to preserve historic buildings.” This book is Lisa Simpson and Hugh Parkfield in a nutshell. Because eating animals is wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong. In Simpsons arcana, the episode that follows this one establishes that Lisa is in fact a vegetarian, but that episode finds Apu […]

Another Ilona Andrews book I absolutely loved. Are you surprised? (double bingo)

Emerald Blaze by Ilona Andrews

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4.5 stars #CBR12 Bingo: Green   Spoiler warning! This is the fifth book total in the Hidden Legacy series, and the second book about Catalina Baylor. This review may spoil details from previous books in the series. If you want to start at the very beginning, the book you want is Burn for Me. If you want to start with Catalina’s books, the first book is Sapphire Flames.    It’s been about six months since the end of the last book, where Catalina Baylor made a very unfortunate, iron-clad deal with […]

‘There’s weird shit,’ I said. ‘And we deal with the weird shit, but normally it turns out that there’s a perfectly rational explanation.’ Which is often that a wizard did it.

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

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In all the hype for the Dresden Filer two-fer, I haven’t forgotten my new other favourite urban fantasy series! Since writing up my thoughts on the first three books in the Peter Grant series, I’ve positivly raced through the next three. I think Ben Aaronovitch really struck gold when he decided to blend a British police procedural with magical shenanigans; I’m racing through the series like a hot knife through butter. While all the books so far have had self-contained stories, there have been threads […]

Sure, we had trouble building Space Station One—but the trouble was people.

Green Hills of Earth by Robert A Heinlein

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CBR12Bingo – Green I think this completes my Bingo board. Or rather, this completes my Bingo Board. A story collection by Robert A Heinlein published in the 1940s. It’s not simply a collection of stories, but hangs together more so like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot or Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as linked stories (thematically at least) about early space exploration, but especially as early space colonization. The stories still mostly hold up and clearly are setting the tone and the scene for a lot of […]

cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]

Whelp, another dystopian book. But this one is a bit more hopeful!

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, read by Adam Grupper

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This is a non-fiction book about what would happen to the environment if all humanity suddenly disappeared.  What would happen to all of our structures, the animals, the plants, and the oceans?  For the most part, good things!  Well, not the structures.  Most of them will fall apart, and fairly quickly without human maintenance.  Without people and power, the NYC subway system is a goner in a few days.  But the forests will come back, although perhaps not the same.  We’ve introduced many invasive species […]



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