Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Loves books.

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An Utterly Underwhelming Account of a Tragedy

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 by Graham Bowley

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No Way Down is an account of the 2008 disaster on K2, Earth’s second highest mountain. 11 people from international expeditions died, while several others were severely injured. The disaster was mainly caused by multiple serac falls and avalanches in an area near the top called the Bottleneck. This is such a strange book because the events it describes are riveting, but the story does not flow, many instances are confusingly presented, there are a ton of holes in the narrative, and there is not even […]

Wouldn’t it be funny if?

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

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I’ve owned this book for 20 years probably, and I think this was my third read through. It is a collection of short stories and some of King’ s earliest work, and the stories are of widely varying quality. Some made me roll my eyes, some left me indifferent, and some were gripping, but there is one I dislike immensely, and two that I kind of love. The one I dislike is the well-known and apparently popular “The Mist”, which takes up about 150 pages […]

“When these people say you belong to me, I own you, it is like the passing of the rain, or the setting of the sun at the end of the day.”

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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In the late 19th century, in pre-colonial coastal East Africa, 12-year-old Yusuf is taken by a merchant to pay off his father’s debts. After working as a store clerk for some years, his master takes him on a trading expedition into the rural interior of the region that lasts several months. Yusuf is a strange and passive character that is hard to relate to. From the outset, things happen to him, while he doesn’t make anything happen; he is swept along for the ride, and […]

“Everything complicated is only complicated because someone is bad at explaining it.”

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer

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One of my favourite YouTube channels is “Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell”. They make short videos on science, technology, politics, philosophy, and more. The topics range from terraforming Venus to loneliness or the deep sea, and they are all explained with, as they call it, “optimistic nihilism”. During the short runtime of about 10 minutes, the videos manage to be educational, funny, profound, and cute all at once. When I learned that the creator had written a book, I just had to buy it. I […]

“The world is my country, science my religion.”

Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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Who was the greatest scientist alive during the period between Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton? It was Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens who made huge contributions to astronomy, optics, and mechanics. His improvement of lenses for telescopes and invention of pendulum clocks, discovery of the first satellite and the ring around Saturn, and his wave theory of light are just a few of his accomplishments. After his death, however, his greatness was unjustly eclipsed by Newton. Although this is mainly a biography of Huygens, it tries […]

“Stranger than fiction – certainly more outsized, surreal and outrageous than anything you’d expect to encounter”

Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

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A woman working in a government call center is stalked by an ex-boyfriend, a man lives in a strange woman’s apartment until he is confronted by one of her friends, and a farmer endeavours to build an airplane. A group of people have to live on a subway platform for months because the authorities won’t let them leave, and the lives of twins diverge when one of them begins to agitate against the government. There are a few overarching themes in this collection of stories […]



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