Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“All I wanted to do was watch media and not exist.”

Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6) by Martha Wells

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 13/30 I love Murderbot and I hope that I always will. What I love about these stories, beyond the immediate appeal of an outwardly misanthropic and antisocial being fighting its own feelings and personhood, is that as they go on, Wells seems to be showing that Murderbot is not just a one story kind of murder-construct (aka not that at all), but one that can play around in different genres. No one will convince me that the full-length novel […]

“The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.”

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) by Arkady Martine

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 12/30 I was so intimidated by this book before I picked it up! There’s a certain attitude that often comes along with intelligent sci-fi with lots of made up names (so many vowels!), and which plays around in the political intrigue sphere. Like, let’s just confuse the shit out of you before we settle into this! Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks! No hand holding! I will show you I’m smart by making everything so hard […]

Thank.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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This review is brought to you in three levels, according to your tolerance for spoilers. I would like to state, for the record, I think anyone reading this review who hasn’t read the book should go in knowing as little as possible. If you think that’s just a swell idea, please remain at review level one, no spoilers: only the info you can find on the dust jacket. Level two will have some basic premise spoilers, and I’ll go into a little detail about the […]

“This did not mean that laws and rules were not helpful, or that explanations should not be sought, but rather that there should be no fear in changing them as needed, for nothing in the universe held still.”

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4) by Becky Chambers

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I’m sad this series is over, but I’m glad it exists, and this was a really good one to go out on. Like the other books in the series, there isn’t really a plot. The story is very character focused, and acts as a sort of slice-of-life. I say sort of, because the circumstances here are slightly out of the ordinary. The whole book takes place over five or so days on the planet Gora, essentially an interstellar truck stop because it intersects with so […]

The one where the main character is a giant worm with arms.

God Emperor of Dune (Dune, #4) by Frank Herbert

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I keep going back and forth on this rating. Reading this series has been a truly weird experience. The first book is a straight up classic that I enjoy reading, despite some issues with it being dated and gross in places. I will read it again! I will see the movie. The second two books I appreciated on an intellectual level but they did not engage me emotionally at all. I was very much dreading the rest of the series after reading those books. And […]

Fun with the Fire Force

Fire Force, Vol. 20 by Atsushi Ohkubo

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Fire Force is an entertaining but somewhat mindless adventure manga series; one of the good things about it is that it doesn’t always take itself too seriously. In a world where human spontaneous combustion is a real threat and most of the world fell apart during a “Great Cataclysm” fire some years before the action starts, Fire Soldiers of the Tokyo Empire are there to do standard fire-fighting but also fight “Infernals”, basically fire monsters that are the result of someone spontaneously combusting. Company 8 […]



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