Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Stephen King’s sprawling historical time-travel epic

11/22/63 by Stephen King

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At work I have a Book Friend who reads mostly horror. He gives me horror recommendations, and I give him sci-fi recommendations, and we both try to enjoy each other’s genre of choice, to varying success. At the other’s insistence, we have both read genre staples without being convinced of their universal relevance (though I have more right to feel aggrieved about this arrangement because Slaughterhouse Five was like 250 pages and It was fucking 1,200 pages, Dorian). It was not for me. I finished It, because I’m a […]

Time traveling is for nerds.

Blackout (All Clear, #1) by Connie Willis

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4 Book 1/30 I’ve sat on this review for several weeks now and the feelings that I have for this book—despite its clear flaws—are overwhelmingly positive. So I’m rounding up to four stars! I always enjoy a Connie Willis book, even when they are debilitatingly sad (looking at you Doomdsay Book), but they do have their flaws. She is OBSESSED with miscommunication and people being unable to find each other, and those kind of plots (which I am not interested […]

Can you DNF a Five Star Read? I did.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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Picture it. Sicily, 1922. Wait, no. That’s not right. Picture it. April 2, 2024. I’m preparing for international travel, and I have this vague desire to read On Theme. But I have no idea what to read, and have way too many books to slog through. I know I want to read digitally, because taking print books on a two-week trip to another country is a terrible idea when you own a kindle. But what do I want to read? I ask around online, because […]

Present Tense, Past Perfect

11.22.63 by Stephen King

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It’s 2011, and Jake Epping is a high school English teacher in a sleepy Maryland town when his friend Al, who runs an implausibly cheap diner on the edge of town, asks him for a big favour: go back in time and stop the Kennedy assassination. You see, Al’s diner has a somewhat unusual feature in its storeroom: a portal back to 1958. After a few furtive explorations, Jake agrees to go down the rabbit hole, find Lee Harvey Oswald, and stop him before he […]

Adventures (and prophecies) through space and time.

The Principle of Moments (The Order of Legends, #1) by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

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I’m glad that my DNFing of a book I thought was terrible only thirty pages in led to me picking this book up much, much sooner than I would have otherwise, because I really enjoyed myself, despite some nitpicks I have with this, mostly to do with the author being a debut author, and an extremely young one. Overall, she feels like an author who could have some really, truly great books down the line. This book, which the author started writing when she was […]

Might have found my worst of the year with my first of the year

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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1.5 stars Warning! This review will contain spoilers, because after my book club discussion yesterday, I’m actually quite cranky about this book, and it’s impossible for me to rant properly if I can’t spoil the heck out of these stories. Don’t worry, you don’t really want to read this book anyway. Also, most of the spoilers are only visible if you go to my blog. In a small, dark basement café in Japan, visitors can travel briefly back in time, if they observe a series […]



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