Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud.”

A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #1) by Marie Brennan

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I finally started this series! I put book one on my TBR back when it was first published and then never got around to it, not even after I met the author at a book festival and got a signed copy of book three (I did not yet own books one or two, but it was the only one available for signing). Maybe I would have gotten to it sooner if I would have realized one of my favorite audiobook narrators, Kate Reading, does the […]

Attention, Murderbot stans: I have a short story for you.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 132 by ed. Neil Clarke

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I downloaded this in 2021 for the Read Harder Challenge but never read it, and no longer remember the challenge I downloaded it for, but I managed to make it fit perfectly into this year’s Read Harder. Efficiency! The issue itself after all of that was a bit of disappointment. I’m noting here at the top that the five-star rating is solely for “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer, a 8,000~ word novelette that won the Hugo in 2018, a win that is […]

I would read ten more of these.

The Grief of Stones (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #2) by Katherine Addison

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These books are sad, contemplative, and lovely. I had a bit of a hard time getting in to the first one because the tone and pacing are pretty unique, but once I sank into it I really enjoyed myself. Right away with The Grief of Stones I was able to get back into the right mindset and I enjoyed it even more. I know there will be at least one more book following Celahar, but I find myself hoping there will be more than that. We need, […]

I just couldn’t do it anymore.

The Wandering Fire (The Fionavar Tapestry, #2) by Guy Gavriel Kay

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I have done something now that I almost never do, and that is give up on a fantasy series. There is only one more book in The Fionavar Tapestry for me to read, and it’s not even that long compared to the books I’m used to tackling in this genre, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. The idea of reading that book filled me with dread and despair. When I was reading the first book in this series, even with how much the genre […]

“Sometimes Paris felt his whole life was in slow motion with ominous music playing over it.”

Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble (Winner Bakes All, #2) by Alexis Hall

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I don’t think this is a book anybody but Alexis Hall could have pulled off. This is a romance and a book about a baking competition, yes, but it’s also a book about a person with severe anxiety, and what that anxiety does to his relationships with the people around him. Paris isn’t an easy character to like, and his story isn’t an easy ride. But it was worth it! Paris Daillencourt ends up on Bake Expectations because his flatmate secretly put him up for […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]



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