Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The best short story collection I’ve read in a while!

Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell

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This is a collection of short stories that really works, unlike the last one I wrote about! I don’t want to include a summary of each story, but I do want to mention my favorites: I have not stopped thinking about The Gondoliers or Orange World since putting this book down two weeks ago. In The Gondoliers, 4 sisters use echolocation (!) to navigate the waters in a presumably post-climate change world. Incredible world building, amazing character study, just all around wonderful and weird. In […]

Don’t Look Now…and some other random stories

Don't Look Now & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

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I was several pages into the first story of this collection, the titular Don’t Look Now, when I realized that I’ve seen this movie! I remember liking the movie just fine, mostly because I love Donald Sutherland, but also thinking that the pacing and climax were a little strange and unconvincing; the horror elements were there but it didn’t quite pack a punch for me. This is also how I felt about the short story, and indeed, about this collection as a whole.  I won’t […]

“You’ve gotten the taste for excitement and adventure:” Great Sci-Fi/Fantasy by Ann Leckie

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

Translation State by Ann Leckie

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Ann Leckie is one of those authors that my brain just clicks with so well that I love everything she writes, like a warm bath for my mind. I always feel very comfortable reading her books because I can trust that she’s taking the plot somewhere that will work for me and that I’ll be satisfied with. She may not be on lists of cozy sci-fi, but it’s somehow cozy to me. I was therefore extremely thrilled to see a collection of her short works […]

Bring It On + Monsters

Dying With Her Cheer Pants On (Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins) by Seanan McGuire

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First, let me tell you the hook for the short stories in this collection: High School cheerleaders (various squad combinations) fight monsters, aliens, and evil gods while also cheering for their school’s football team and participating in cheer competitions. Now let me try and explain the format/setup of this book as best I can by using some of the author’s own words. This quote is from the forward of the collection where Seanan McGuire writes about growing up in the 80s and loving sandbox novels; […]

“Only living here wasn’t exactly turning out to be normal.”

Night of the Living Queers by Shelly Page and Alex Brown

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In honor of Pride month (well, actually, Overdrive selected it for me because it was available, and, fortuitously, it fits the theme!), I picked up Night of the Living Queers, edited by Shelly Page and Alex Brown. This YA short story collection, which is unfortunately named, in my opinion, was terrific. As with any short story collection, there were a few stories that didn’t work so well for me, but as a collection, writing quality was uniformly high, the variety was delicious in terms of […]

“Never before have so many been threatened with so much…Never has so much been promised to so many.”

The 9th Annual of the Year's Best SF by Judith Merril (Editor)

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This is a pretty long and comprehensive collection of good SF from 1963 (384 pages, so you’re definitely getting a lot). I enjoyed most of these stories and breezed through this on the Amtrak to and from visiting home. My mom also enjoyed the chunk she read while I was home, so it’s intergenerationally approved. However, nothing in here really blew me away and it all felt pretty standard and not hugely boundary pushing or subversive. Sometimes you do just need to read some classic […]



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