Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

From the Plains of Texas to the Mountains of India

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

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The thing that I don’t think people who have not read Neal Stephenson understand about his writing is that it is pulpy and action packed. They see the size of a book like Termination Shock, read the description, and think—oh this is gonna be some heavy shit. And sure, he does go into multi-page digressions about whatever his current research obsession is, but that is also interspersed with plane crashes and people shooting boars out of helicopters. He starts Seven Eves with blowing up the […]

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson (1992)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

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Well, I remembered this book quite fondly, and might have enjoyed continuing to remember it fondly, but it’s a little rough going some 30 years on and a second time through. The book starts at full throttle and is a lot of fun for a while. Hiro Protagonist is the world’s best hacker, swordsman, and pizza delivery driver until a an eff-up at the chain causes him to be late on a delivery. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except that all pizza delivery […]

The future, the present and the past are all scary places

The name of the rose by Umberto Eco

The searcher by Tana French

The push by Ashley Audrain

The hunting party by Lucy Foley

Snow crash by Neal Stephenson

Ready player two by Ernest Cline

Tender is the flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

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My final review dump and then I’ll be all caught up! Woohoo! These books are about the past, the present and the future. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco Eco is my dad’s favourite author. He’s read all of his books, some of them probably several times. I, on the other hand, had never read anything by Eco before. I had seen bits of the film years ago that had intrigued me enough to want to read the book but for some reason […]

Grounded in reality, gripping science fiction: cbr12bingo White Whale

SevenEves by Neal Stephenson

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SevenEves is my “White Whale” for Cannonball bingo 12.  When it came out, my spouse raved about it and in the five years since its release, SevenEves keeps cropping up on “best of lists” and positive Cannonballer reviews.  Despite all the positivity, I was resistant to reading based on size and how that could affect my cannonball.  The White Whale square gave me an excellent reason to move it to the top of the TBR. To some extent, my title says it all.  SevenEves is one […]

A meandering but mostly fun ride

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

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This massive book covers time travel, witchcraft, academia, military machinations, and more science and physics than this English major could comfortably follow. It feels like several different books mashed together (maybe because of the dual authors?), but the merging of all the pieces was pretty successful. I haven’t read much Stephenson, so I’m not sure how much was him and how much was Galland, but I enjoyed most of it. Melisande Stokes is trapped in 1851 London, and is writing down everything that happened to […]

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

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I am reading this book in chunks throughout the summer for a few reasons: A) it’s really long and not exactly tedious, but demanding a little. It’s not a complicated book but the prose is detailed and a little exacting. B) I have an audiobook of the first part of this, and this seems like an easy way to chunk it out. C) The book itself is divided into three sections that are distinct and when the book first came out, I read the first […]



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