Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

One of the few times I will say to watch the movie first.

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

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I probably chose the wrong time to read this one, as so many of my friends like it quite a bit, even ones who don’t like Thomas Hardy as a writer. But it nicely filled a challenge for Read Harder, and because it’s been on my TBR for over a decade, and it was available on SCRIBD, I did it. And I didn’t not like it, I just found it hard to finish, and it never really caught my attention. I missed soooo much while […]

“Maybe it wasn’t about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

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This felt like two separate books to me, and one of them I liked much better than the other. The two central characters in this novel are Deming Guo and his mother, Polly, who is a Chinese immigrant (undocumented) from the city of Fuzhou, now living in New York (I loved the specificity of Deming and Polly insisting they speak Fuzhounese, which is a dialect of Min Chinese; this book had great cultural and historical detail like this all throughout). The first third of the […]

So much goodness stuffed into one little novella.

The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

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This was very entertaining, and very refreshing. I just wish it was longer! (That seems to be a common complaint.) This is an alternate history and steampunk fantasy novella set in New Orleans post-Civil War. In this version of history, the Civil War ended with two separate Americas, and New Orleans also seceded into a neutral city-state that is heavily diverse, and populated by many people from the free Caribbean region. Our main character is Creeper (given name Jacquelin, but don’t call her that, she […]

I still don’t really know how I feel about this book. #CBRBingo – Red

Me Before You (Me Before You, #1) by Jojo Moyes

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This is one of those books that has the weight of expectations before you even pick it up. I bought it, actually at a Rainbow Rowell reading, right before the movie came out and everyone was talking about it all the time. Then my sister completely spoiled me for the plot (I asked her to; she wasn’t being a dick), and it sounded like something that would make me angry, so I just never got around to it. Flash forward to this year when the […]

“The nameless slave shall wear a silver crown.”

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

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The first time I read this way back in 2008 I gave it five stars out of reflex, and then later I downgraded to four (I even deleted my Goodreads review because it just seemed excessive and ridiculous). My instinct upon finishing the second time was also to just smack five of ’em on there. It’s just so well-written, and so comprehensive, and so epic-feeling. It’s practically got it’s own gravity. And then I stepped away from it for a while, again (in this case […]

“We should be focused on saving the Interdependency from collapse. Instead we’re playing palace intrigues. It’s pointless. It’s wasteful. And it’s going to end in our ruin.”

The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3) by John Scalzi

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A good ending to the series. This hasn’t been my favorite of Scalzi’s series (I still hold a very fond place in my heart for Old Man’s War), but it was overall a great read. It also takes his usual smart-ass style and amps it up to a thousand. The tongue-in-cheek tone makes for a nice contrast with the serious subject matter, and makes it so that when a character is doing something serious, you feel it more than maybe you would otherwise. I’ve been […]



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