Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

“well they’re all good dogs” …or stories

The Year's Best Science Fiction volume 2 by Jonathan Strahan

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I adore short story collections, and I was particularly impressed by last year’s anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. It follows the same format as last year, with the editor’s introduction including other recommended reading as well as general comments on the state of the publishing industry in 2020. And then we get into the real meat of it: 27 short stories that are, arguably, the best of the year. While some stories missed the mark a bit for me, they were all well-written and interesting. “well […]

An excellent spec fiction anthology

The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

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I absolutely adore speculative fiction anthologies, so when I saw that both C.L. Clark and T.L. Huchu had stories in this one, I had to read it. This is a collection of twenty-nine stories from 2020 told by African or African diaspora writers, a good mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror. There are stories that deal with age-old problems like racism and parenthood and newer ones like climate change and gentrification, from robot revolutions to vengeful djinn. Most of the stories were a solid […]

There’s a Lot More to it Than the Title Implies

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera

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CBR Bingo: Cityscape First things first, with a title like that it’s obvious that They Both Die at the End is going to be a tearjerker, and I don’t normally enjoy tearjerkers. It’s a testament to Adam Silvera’s writing that I not only finished this book but that I liked it. Mateo and Rufus are teens living in New York who, just after midnight on the same day, get a call from Death-Cast: the service that accurately predicts the day you’ll die and lets you know […]

Funny but a little bit dated in LGBTQ+ depiction

Practical Demonkeeping: Pine Cove Series, 1 by Christopher Moore

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CBR 13 Bingo: Self Care and Bingo #3!- I listened to this book while taking my daily health stomps to take care of myself. Rarely do my book reviews elicit any reactions or comments on my Facebook page but my review of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal had multiple friends commenting how much they love Christopher Moore and the next book I need to read is Practical Demonkeeping. So once I completed listening to the Dresden Files short stories, I used the […]

The Importance of the Library

Deal With the Devil by Kit Rocha

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Bingo 18: Shelfie I knew there was going to be some romance going into Deal with the Devil, but I was really hoping the series title “Mercenary Librarians” would be more the focus. Sadly for me, this was definitely more romance than librarian-ness. Set in a somewhat generic dystopic US potentially within my lifetime (maybe, assuming I get close to the triple digit age) after humanity has been devastated by some massive solar flare activity (I liked how this was put in; not a big […]



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