Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An intimate story of friendship and its many forms, wrapped in a sci fi setting!

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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If I’m nothing more than a tool, then I must have a purpose.  Tools have purposes, right?  But I’m more than that.  Pepper and Blue… have been telling me that again and again and again.  I know I’m more than a tool.” I was surprised to learn that the second book in Becky Chamber’s “Wayfarer Series” does not feature the same cast and pivots in a completely different direction.  I had become invested in everyone in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet so […]

Hail Mary, full of Grace

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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According to Wikipedia, “A Hail Mary pass is a very long forward pass in American football, typically made in desperation, with an exceptionally small chance of achieving a completion. Due to the difficulty of a completion with this pass, it makes reference to the Catholic “Hail Mary” prayer for divine help.” When Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary begins, Ryland Grace is the sole living astronaut onboard a spaceship named Hail Mary heading to a distant star as a one-shot suicide mission to save the Earth. […]

A somehow really boring corporate espionage technology thriller

Agency by William Gibson

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I have attempted William Gibson before; I did not enjoy Neuromancer at all. But Agency is considerably more recent and the premise made more sense to me. Basically, Verity is an app developer/tester who is brought on to field test “Eunice” an AI assistant of sorts, but Verity realizes there’s a good bit more to Eunice than anyone seems to have guessed, and soon mysterious corporate shenanigans are afoot, and there is some involvement from parallel universes, one of which has the technology to keep […]

Two Comics and a Horror

Paper Girls, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughn, et al.

Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller and Dave Mazzucchelli

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

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Read two comics and re-read a horror classic. All good in their various ways, two not living up to the potential of greatness and one with said potential… Paper Girls, Volume 1 A lot of folks warned that this one would be confusing but being a huge “Saga” fan, I was willing to give Brian K. Vaughn the benefit of the doubt. And it paid off. It’s a good table setter for what promises to be a good story. I liked the characters and, I’ve […]

My Entrypoint for Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

The Mountains of Mourning by Vorkosigan Saga

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So a bit of re-reading was rquired here before I could write this one up. I am a huge fan of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Huge. And I am not the only one here. So as someone who is a big fan, I’m usually pretty eager to reccomend the series to other people. And this is where I sort of run into a problem. Because the Vorkosigan Saga sort of has the same issue as the Discworld series. This is a long running series […]

“We’re both exiles, she’d thought, right then, and had hated herself for thinking it. She’d been gone a few months. She had no right to the name. She was home. She wasn’t, and she knew it. (There was no such place any longer.)”

A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2) by Arkady Martine

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What a great series, top to bottom. I don’t even want to talk about it. (Or, I want to talk about it for five hours straight.) I kind of already want to re-read. If you like science fiction, this is a must read. It’s so self-assured, so smart, so well put together, so full of heart and yet also full of thinking. It’s so hard to find an author who can stimulate both my thinking brain and my feeling brain, and Arkady Martine is a […]



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