Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ninth House is great, but it’s not a feel-good read

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

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I feel like I should start this review with some trigger warnings. Ninth House contains multiple descriptions of sexual assault, including assault of a child, bullying, and descriptions of drug use and abuse. I think the book handled these subjects as well as can be expected. I generally don’t read books involving rape or child abuse, so I wouldn’t have read Ninth House if I had known beforehand.  Ninth House is about a young woman named Galaxy (Alex) Stern who is admitted to Yale and inducted […]

Poetry and Politics Can Be Interesting

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

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I am starting to wonder if my local library hasn’t hired someone new in charge of new purchases who might not be my reading twin. The library has suddenly started getting in new books that I personally want to read not long after they are published. A Memory Called Empire is among those titles. The premise is pretty normal sounding: a new ambassador to the capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire (which spans planets and systems) arrives at her new job to discover that her predecessor […]

“And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.”

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

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I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. “Golden Age Sci-Fi” isn’t always something that personally resonates with me. A lot of it is very dated, or rooted in the time period it was written in, or focuses on ideas and themes that aren’t as interesting to me as more modern sci-fi. But this book feels almost timeless, and though I don’t usually care about the prose of a book as much as I do its ability to make me care for […]

I thought this one was better than the first.

The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut, #2) by Mary Robinette Kowal

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So I never actually wrote a review of the first book in this series. I review-amnestied it late last year, in the 40+ reviews I just gave up on because I let my review backlog get Out Of Control. We read this for my IRL book club, and we were all excited to read about lady astronauts doing science and winning against misogyny, but all of us had very mixed feelings about it. I flew through the book, but also had problems with it at […]

“Gully Foyle is my name, and Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, and death’s my destination.”

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

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I did a little mini-binge of classic sf books at the end of February, and this one (which I’ve owned in audio for ages) was the first up. It’s also the one I’m the least sure about. The Stars My Destination is considered one of the most important works of sf, and Bester is nearly always mentioned in talks about the masters of the genre. This was the first book I’ve read by him, and his most well-known (although his other well-known book, The Demolished […]

A space action romance that has me looking forward to book two.

Polaris Rising (The Consortium Rebellion, #1) by Jessie Mihalik

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I actually liked the plot and the world better than the romance, so, not my fave there. (Alphaholes are not my thing at all.) But I still liked it! This series takes place in the future, an unspecified amount of time from now, in which the Earth was rendered uninhabitable, and the governing of human society has evolved into a Consortium of three powerful families who rule absolutely (and have retaken Earth for rich people, by invitation only). There are spaceships and faster-than-light travel, advanced […]



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