Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When the map matters more than the people there will be murder

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

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I really like the premise and general scenario of The Cartographers; you’ve got a good dose of real historical and practical map-making details along with a dose of “magical realism”. I also didn’t realize that this author was relevant to AAIPI month which May is. The general premise is that former whiz kid map scholar Nell Young who was dismissed from the famed NYPL (New York Public Library) in disgrace by her own father must now solve the mystery of her father’s murder which turns […]

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The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

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Did you love Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore? Do you love maps? Ok, you will very likely love The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. Bear in mind though that it won’t *always* be the most logical book, so if you are the kind of person that is driven crazy by magically induced plotholes then it might not be for you. One of my favorite things about this book is that it was inspired by a true historical story about phantom settlements and how cartographers used them […]

Find your way to this book come April 2022

Mapmakers and the Lost Magic (A Graphic Novel) by Cameron Chittock

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Mapmakers and the Lost Magic (A Graphic Novel) is an odd little story. At first it seemed like Cameron Chittock was creating it to be straightforward: Alidade, a young girl of the village, wants to leave. You assume that she will learn “there is no place like home” but it quickly takes a turn for the slightly darker. There are the guards that stop anyone from leaving the village, they curb individuality, and are controlled by a woman who (due to illustrations placing her in […]

Map porn

The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching

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As regular haunter of r/mapporn with a large appetite for history, The Golden Atlas was a pretty perfect Christmas gift for me, a gorgeously illustrated book featuring lots of ancient maps and the stories of how the lands depicted on them were discovered. Taking us from antiquity up until the Victorian age, when we finally inked in bits of the last of the world’s unknown lands, some of my favourites were those that were based heavily on conjecture. Whether these were the maps of the […]

Two different stories that tie into each other

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Fur, Feather, Fin All of Us Are Kin and Mapping Sam are two science books that are not dull science. While Fur is more traditional science, it is written so it reads as a story. And Sam is a story that has information in it. Mapping Sam was my favorite out of the two. Joyce Hesselberth creates a story of a cat that puts their family to bed then goes out into the night on their nightly adventures. They explore all sorts of areas, climb […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List #6

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Connectography is one of those books that tries looking at something differently.  In the case of Connectography, if I’m being extremely simple, that something is maps.  Parag Khanna essentially discusses how he thinks maps will change in the future.  The world will be divided less by political and geographical boundaries and more by economic interests, specifically logistics. Khanna offers up examples to support his argument.  He looks at Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and discusses how countries, like China, have used them to grow and expand. […]



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