Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Now did you think it all through? All these things will catch up to you…” (Double bingo)

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

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Nowhere Book Bingo: From a genre you’ve never read (true crime) CBR16 Bingo: Fiasco (Theranos was a massive fraud and a fiasco) I’ve owned this book since 2020 and am pretty sure I picked it up in an e-book sale because of the many Cannonball reviews I’ve read about it over the years. Not being particularly interested in the tech world or medical science, and certainly, not someone who reads a lot of business news, I didn’t really hear about this case as it was […]

“Tech is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so. Computers just reflect the existing reality and suggest that things will stay the same—they predict the status quo.”

More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech by Meredith Broussard

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Meredith Broussard’s More than a Glitch took me a long time to read (nearly two months) for such a short book (around 190 pages before Notes and Bibliography). But if you happened to attend Cannonball Read’s Murderbot book club then you got a glimpse at part of what was bothering me about reading this book right now – and why it was so important that I do so. I’m having big issues with the onslaught of AI (specifically generative AI) especially with so little oversight […]

The Future Is Bleak

Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson

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Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: Tech. In addition to some of the tech developments set in this near-future pre-apocalyptic tale, one of the main subplots is an interactive video game the characters play that features heavily in the narrative. This book started out interesting enough: we come upon a disaffected broke upper class Brooklyn couple, trying to recover from infertility and the loss of an infant. The husband has lost their money at a time of a bad economic downturn but is trying to […]

‘He is in a dream but the beast is not. It comes! Wake!’

The Keeping Place by Isobelle Carmody

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Ok, I am trying my best to keep the momentum up here because I feel that I may not have much free time in the next few weeks after quarter starts. As I mentioned in my review of the first book, Obernewtyn, The Obernewtyn Chronicles ended up expanding beyond the author’s original plans. There was originally going to be five books in the series, making The Keeping Place, the penultimate volume. Instead, The Keeping Place ended up as book four of seven. And maybe the […]

Confusing, but fun

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

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Nowhere Book Bingo: Award Winner (Won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1998, plus a bunch of others) Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Scene on a boat or body of water (there’s a lot of rowing on the river) CBR16 Bingo: Tech (time travel requires pretty specific technology) This is the second book in the Oxford Time Travel series, but you really don’t need to have read the first one, Doomsday Book, to understand and enjoy this one. In the universe these books are set in, […]

Games Don’t Seem Fun?

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

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Not too long ago I reviewed gaming journalist Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels – a book looking at the development of a dozen games in the 2000s and 2010s. Due to the size of the games and the graphic fidelity, hundreds of people can work YEARS on a AAA game (a major game). It’s controlled chaos and tons of crunch (working nonstop for extended periods). Schreier told some compelling stories in that book, and in this followup he explores what it’s like to have […]



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