Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Murderbot brings me so much joy

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

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The last half of 2018 was such a hellhole for me personally that I kind of just stopped posting reviews and one that I missed out on getting to review was the excellent first book in the Murderbot series. I’m not surprised at how popular the series is here as they seems like the perfect Cannonball Read kind of books. Plus, they’re novellas so it’s really easy to tear through them quickly. —> Spoilers below for previous books! <— Artificial Condition (Murderbot #2) – 5 […]

Evil AIs are in my wheelhouse

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

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I picked this up purely based on the renewed buzz it was getting in one of my book circles. It was available as a library audio download, so why not? I went into it knowing basically nothing about it except what the cover looked like. I was honestly expecting a mystery book since it seemed like a case file. And I guess it really is a case file, just not the kind I was anticipating. In reality, it’s part evil AI sci fi and part […]

Just as outstanding as the first book, now I need to seek out The Lady Astronaut short stories

The Fated Sky: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Fun fact, Robinette is not part of her last name and while it sits in the middle of her name it isn’t technically a middle name either.  She is Mary Robinette, and that is how she prefers to be called.  Both Mary and Robinette are in honor of her grandmothers.  It is not uncommon to find her books misshelved due to this misunderstanding.   The Fated Sky is the second book in the Lady Astronaut duolgy that started with The Calculating Stars.  The alternate timeline Kowal created has […]

“Nothing … was private: only secret, only silent. We ate our tears.”

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

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  This book is so wildly out of my wheelhouse that I don’t really feel qualified to assess it. I’ve almost never read science fiction and rarely read short story collections, and I’m sure I’ve never read a book that was both. There were some stories I loved and some I hated (luckily, the longer novella at the end hit a solid “liked a lot” on that scale), but without a doubt I now have tremendous respect for Le Guin as a writer. It’s astonishing […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Get lured in by the world-building, stay for the intersectional dissection of oppression

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?” Most people don’t deeply question (cough, Kanye, cough) why enslaved people “allowed” themselves to remain enslaved. But most of us also don’t dwell deeply on what systematic physical and psychological trauma would be needed to keep a whole class of people oppressed and how that trauma may ripple out generationally. And why would we? Envisioning something like that is […]



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