Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Review of the Great Books

The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #2-4) by Elena Ferrante

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I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good stories, but they don’t feel gratuitous in their misery, either. As a woman, my vicarious […]

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6/22/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:47 |

“Of course I’ve got a conscience, he’s sitting right next to me.”

Jackdaw by KJ Charles

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Jonah Pastern is a magician, a liar, a windwalker, a professional thief… which about sums up the character as we met him in ‘A Flight of Magpies’.  This book is set shortly after that one and is a linked story to that world.  You don’t necessarily have to read the Magpie trilogy to understand this book, but it certainly helps since many of the characters make an appearance here. Based on Jonah’s actions in the previous book, I wasn’t sure he would be a guy to root for as a hero in his own book.  And at the start, when […]

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6/22/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:54 |

The Variants are back, and so is Apollo!

Extinction Aftermath (The Extinction Cycle Book 6) by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

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This is book six in the Extinction Cycle books.  I read book five a few months ago, and then needed a little break from the bleak world of the Variants and the Juveniles and all the fighting.  When I picked this book up (Kindle version natch), it took me a little while to get into it, for those very same reasons.  Once I got going though, I couldn’t stop.  I love the characters in this world.  Also, Apollo is back.  Once I saw he’d be fighting with a main character (Fitz), I clicked on X-ray on my Kindle to see […]

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6/22/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:32 |

Sanderson does detective fiction with a sf twist.

Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson

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I swear, one of these days Brandon Sanderson will write something that I dislike—something that is boring or trite or that just plain doesn’t work—but that day is not this day. This day that son of a gun has written yet another clever, entertaining story for me to four or five star. And this time he takes on detective stories! With a fantasy twist, of course. In the near future, some sort of supernatural event has reshaped the world, and made it possible to recreate exact, life-size replicas of entire days. It’s left vague why this ‘technology’ was actually created, […]

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6/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:46 |

Somebody give Glen Weldon a high-five.

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

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The best thing about The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon’s book-length ode to Batmania, is Glen Weldon himself. Sure, the actual book is informative and well thought out, organized and insightful. But it’s also got a personality to it, thanks to Weldon, who impregnates even the most mundane sentence with his dry wit and his enthusiasm for his two subjects (Batman, the nature of nerdery). His twin theses? Nerdery isn’t about what you love, but loving what you love with a staggering, vacuum-sucking passion. And that all the Batmans that have existed over his seventy-eight year history, from the campiest Batus-dancing […]

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6/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:45 |

You’re gonna love whenever they make this into a tv series

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

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So I have to admit I don’t know that this book (series) is for everyone. There’s a conversation I had or something I read or heard about the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle is designed to be solved and the pieces and clues necessary to do so are all available. And so whether you’re going to an Escape the Room or playing a Resident Evil game or reading an Agatha Christie novel, you’re enmeshed in an a puzzle or series of puzzles. A mystery is more of a vague thing. It’s mysterious because it doesn’t have […]

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6/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:245 |

I liked this better two months ago.

Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2) by Sarah J. Maas

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This book has definitely soured on me since I finished it in May, which is a shame since I am quite literally about to start the third book tonight. This series for me has turned out so far to be a shoddily written, cliché-packed, predictable behemoth with an uninteresting not-as-smart-or-talented-as-she-or-the-author-thinks-she-is protagonist. It’s very much a yo-yo book for me. One minute I’ll be rolling my eyes so hard I’m about to sprain my optical nerve, the next Maas writes something genuinely interesting. Also, both books of hers I’ve read now fall into the same traps. They start out pretty dull, […]

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6/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:44 |

Today was my last teacher workday, so I read this.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

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Diane Ravitch doesn’t believe in conspiracy theories, and neither do I. If you hold the belief that education is a funneling institution designed to make people dumber and more compliant and more consumerist and all that, I think you’re foolish and wrong. If, though, you talked about how one of the effects of a schooling based in testing, accountability, profit, and various other aims that are not really part of the goals of education is some version of the above, then I might agree with you. Like a lot of things in politics, the ways schools are run is a […]

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6/21/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:244 |

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