Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.”

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

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I’ll come across book recommendations from a variety of sources. Lots of times I’ll have read about them on my own, or found my way to them via other authors that I already like. Sometimes somebody I know will recommend something that I will actually read. Occasionally I’ll wander around one of my local libraries in a familiar section and find something decent that way. Lately I’ve stumbled on a few through YouTubers or podcasters I like, and this was one of those. The Gone […]

Space Opera Done Fantastic

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

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You guys, I really, really liked this book. Let’s start off there. It combines what I loved in the first parts of The Expanse series with Star Trek, stirs in the best bits of Firefly, and then adds a bunch of its own stuff. It’s very good. If that’s all you need to get you started, then go forthwith and devour at the next available opportunity. But I can’t get away with that little of a review, and I don’t really want to anyway, so […]

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

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This is going to be a tough review to write. First off, I loved it, and I find those reviews difficult. Second, it’s another big Culture novel from Iain M. Banks, and as I found last year with Matter, it’s hard to distill everything into a brief review. I’ll do my best on both counts, but I’ll just start with this: for anyone who loves hard science fiction in general and space opera in particular, the Culture novels are the absolute best I’ve read. Surface […]

Maybe you’re a misfit, too. Doesn’t mean you’re not deserving. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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My first CBR last year was eye-opening, to say the least. I paid more attention to my reading than I have since college, and I also paid fresh attention to my book choices after being confronted by the ugly truth of my blindspot for women authors. And though not every book was a winner, I did fall in love with a number of books and authors new to me, including Becky Chambers and her delightful The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, one of […]

“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”

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Neal Stephenson’s writing process must be insane. This is my third book of his and I am continually astounded by the level of obsessive technical detail present for whichever field happens to be the critical science du jour in each book. Snow Crash took great liberties with neurolinguistics, but it was still clear that Stephenson had done his homework and there was a foundation of knowledge there. Jumping straight to his most recent novel, I found Seveneves stunning, not just because of, again, the amount […]

A truly stunning sci-fi book for the ages

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Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]



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