Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Another Airport Transit Read

Sleep Donation: A Novella by Karen Russell

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This is another book gifted to me by andtheIToldYouSos last year. And this also turned out to be a great little novella to slip into my handbag for those times I was transiting through airports—this time to Indianapolis. Sleep deprivation is a brutal thing; unfortunately in the last few months, I’ve experienced a good deal of that. However, in Sleep Donation,  loss of sleep has become the new pandemic. In its most extreme form, it kills. However, there is a therapy that has been developed […]

Medieval Armageddon

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

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This was…not the book I was expecting. I figured it would just be three people questing their way through medieval horror episodes. And it is that. The thing is: the horror is taking place during the bubonic plague, which has also apparently opened a portal to hell freeing the demons to do cosmic battle with the angels…hence the horrors on earth. Yeah this book is a lot. And it’s really good. The three main characters are cyphers for the larger story Christopher Buehlman is trying […]

Entertained, But Left Wanting

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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I wanted to like this more than I did. And I did enjoy it, but I was expecting more after having read Sea of Tranquility and seeing how much other Cannonballers like this one. Station Eleven alternates settings between when a flu pandemic starts and 20 years later in the post-apocalyptic world. In the future, Kirsten, one of the main characters, is an actor in The Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel from small town to small town to perform for […]

Nanorrobots Prodigiosos?

Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años by Juan José Gómez Cadenas; Juan Botas

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So for my European bingo spot, I’m going to review a science book about humanity’s tangles with viruses that eventually builds to the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años‘ (‘Virus. The war of a billion years’) is a bit of a curiosity for me: this book about viruses, diseases, and pandemics, which was written with a Spanish perspective in mind, was completed during the very first few months of the pandemic. The authors state in the introduction that the writing […]

Good Boy, Good Book

Rez Dogs by Joseph Bruchac

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This is a happy dog story! Malian (which is pronounced “Mary-Ann” in Wabanaki language) is visiting her grandparents on their Wabanaki reservation when shelter-in-place orders go into effect for the COVID-19 pandemic.  What was supposed to be a brief visit becomes a long stay, with Malian trying to keep up with Zoom middle school on the rez’s spotty wi-fi and trying to keep her elderly family members safe. Malian isn’t the only unexpected visitor to the rez; a beautiful, mysterious dog shows up and makes […]

“The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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I heard good things, great things even, about Louise Erdrich from a few book pals and ya know she also has won a Pulitzer (though not for this book) so I knew I wanted to check her out. I came upon a discounted copy of this book at my local bookstore and Bob’s your uncle I bought the book. Aside: I typed that previous sentence and immediately thought, “Where does the idiom “Bob’s your uncle” even come from?!” A Google search says it’s unclear in […]



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