Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

More assorted Ends

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

We Always Treat Women too Well by Raymond Queneau

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I, Autohouse by Gish Jen

American Santa by Vanessa Hua

One More Hour by Carrie Brownstein and Corrin Tucker

My Therapist, My Lover by Cris Beam

Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Adichie

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The Sense of an Ending – 4/5 Stars This is a reread from a few years ago, and in the reread I like it a lot better now than I did then. I do think the plot goes a little off the rails but the narration, the narrator, the character development are all alive and rich, and so beautifully and painfully rendered. There’s a lot of emotional tenderness, sadness, pain, anger, and spirit here. Our narrator is a man in his late fifties or early […]

Mixed Bag of Mixed Bags

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Steel and Other Stories by Richard Matheson

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Going Solo by Roald Dahl

Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein

V2 by Robert Harris

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The Wordy Shipmates – 4/5 Stars I wonder how many people know that if you’re from parts of the country, you’re basically not taught about the Puritans at all. You get the same kind of education that Sarah Vowell talks about early in this book with discussions about “the first Thanksgiving” and plenty of other oblique, but not entirely in depth look into the early colonialization of New England. In the South, you’re mostly taught about Jamestown, or your own respective colony (if you had […]

Time Enough for Love – Robert Heinlein (1973)

Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein

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You will be forgiven if you kind of can’t stand Lazarus Long, and therefore don’t really want to read a 600 page about a man who is so appealing to women that he’s been married dozens of times and sired hundreds of children. But when dealing with longevity, it’s also reasonable to dislike some of the products of it, while still respecting the experiences they’ve been through. After 2300 years of life, Lazarus Long is tired, he’s sad, and he’s mad that he’s being rejuvenated […]

If a man walks in dressed like a hick and walking around as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

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This is a novel about doubles, but more specifically this is a novel about an actor who gets hired to replace a dying and/or incapacitated politician. It takes place mostly on Mars, which led me to wonder if this is the same Mars of Stranger in a Strange Land, but mostly I was thinking about how much I didn’t care that much about the politics of the world. If the plot sounds familiar, it is. This book is basically Dave, at least in the broad strokes. And it’s […]

“‘What the hell goes on here?’ Wesley Ardmore demanded.”

Sixth Column by Robert Heinlein

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An almost good book that gets more and more racist as we get into it. So this is the book that inspired the movies Red Dawn, but it’s incredibly more intelligent and inventive than either of those two movies could ever claim. The Pan-Asian army has taken over the United States and a group of scientists in a secretive lab have survived the war in secret and been left with their equipment, minds, bodies, and capabilities in tact. The only issue is that there is […]



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