Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I was today years old when I discovered this book and I are pretty much the same age

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

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3.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Machinery (space ships, the guide, Marvin – a lot of examples) Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to discover his house is about to be bulldozed. He’s very upset about it and goes to lie down in front of one of the bulldozers, so it can’t knock down his house, but is interrupted by his friend Ford Prefect, who has some very important things to tell him, and very little time left to do so. It turns out Ford Prefect is […]

Becky Chambers does it again (just…could she do it for longer???)

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

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Machinery: because, duh, robots, but could also be They She He since Dex is nonbinary (a fact never really commented on!) Man oh man does Chambers have a style: she’s going to sneakily set up a world, and then just WALLOP you with utterly charming characters whom you cannot help but get invested in. The worst part of this book? That it’s so short–more of a long-ish novella than a real, fulsome standalone book. I don’t know if this is the first in a series […]

“What yesterday was sure footing is now unstable ground.”

Doggerland by Ben Smith

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On an off-shore windfarm in the North Sea, the Boy, who no longer is a boy, and the Old Man, who already worked with the Boy’s father before he disappeared, are tasked with the upkeep of the wind turbines while living on a maintenance rig. Their relationship is plagued by mistrust and resentment, but they need each other desperately; the work is not only dull and repetitive, but ultimately futile as the turbines are slowly corroding more and more, land has become a foreign concept […]

The future is an intricately beautiful machine

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR13bingo: Machinery Thaniel works as a telegraphist for the Home Office, a master of the machine.  He’d rather be playing the piano, but his civil service salary allows him to support his widowed sister and nephews and pays the rent for his sad little room in a boarding house on the bank of the Thames. Mori made the exquisitely beautiful watch that was left on Thaniel’s bed in a velvet box.  The watch that saved Thaniel’s life, and brought both of them under suspicion of […]

Ship Breaker – Paolo Bacigalupi (2010)

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

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CBR13Bingo – Machinery A book that took me a few false starts to get into. For one, this book is bleak. It’s version of the world involves young children and adolescents eschewing childhood into a life of pure survival. If you’re old enough you can work light crew, finding the wiring, odds and ends, and other manageable salvage from old ships on the Gulf coast. Once you’re old enough, you can move on to heavy crew. Nailer is still on light crew when he falls […]



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