Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About jmsudar

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JM Sudar dreams of someday walking into a bookstore and seeing a book of his own for sale. After hearing his wife lament that she forgot to write her Cannonball review _again_, he decided to pick up a controller and give it a try himself.

jmsudar's Reviews:

The History of the Computer

The History of the Computer by Rachel Ignotofsky

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The History of the Computer is exactly what it sounds like, and it does a wonderful job. Over the course of the book it highlights the beginnings of algorithmic thinking via Ada Lovelace, through the mainframe computers like UNIVAC, up to a forward looking take on modern computing that, shockingly, already feels a little outdated because it was written pre-ChatGPT, and many of the things it speculates about with generative AI are already coming true. This is another one where I really can’t say a […]

Dune, The Graphic Novel Vol. 1

Dune, The Graphic Novel Vol. 1 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

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Dune is the sort of fiction I can and have consumed in as many forms of media as I can reach: the original novel, two movies, a TV show, and now a graphic novel series. There is so much imagination and fantastic imagery in this series that consuming different versions can be an entirely different window into the series from another. So was adding an additional window worth it? Yes. Why? The worms. The Sandworms in Dune are one of its key features (only more […]

Working Boats

Working Boats by Tom Crestodina

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, I love cross-section books. The works of Steven Biesty are some of my all-time favs to revisit. The intricate detail, Wimmelbinder fun of finding all the things in a lively and complex drawing is very soothing to certain noisy parts of my brain. As such, after I’d checked out at one of my favorite local bookstores, and saw Working Boats on the shelf post-checkstand, with its cross-section of an OSHA research vessel on the cover, I grabbed a copy and looped back through the […]

Tombs

Tombs by Junji Ito

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This is another Cannonball where I’m unfortunately not going to have a lot to say, mostly because the stories in this collection didn’t stick with me very intensely. Junji Ito remains the undisputed master of Japanese horror manga, but this would probably not be the story collection I would recommend to people who were new to or just becoming familiar with his work. For those, stick to Uzumaki, Tomie, Gyo, Shiver, or Fragments of Horror. The title story of Tombs details a brother and sister […]

The Mountain & The Sea

The Mountain & The Sea by Kwame Dawes

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I didn’t mean to read more Literature with a Capital L, but a coworker I like and trust recommended this book to me, citing its poetic prose, and hooboy is that an accurate assessment. This is exactly the sort of story that shows us why diversity in our authors is important. It tells the story of a Jamaican woman who, after a hurricane, finds herself hosting an amnesiac man, who she can’t help but notice is easy on the eyes. Romance ensues. I say this […]

The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander

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The second book in the Prydain Chronicles is also the name by which 90% of people are familiar with this story and the characters, because it shares the name with a Disney movie. The Disney movie in question is considered one of the blackest sheep in the entire library, because hooboy is it dark and scary. The villain is the Horned King, borrowed from the Book of Three and turned into a non-comical Skeletor. The Horned King’s dungeons, weird sidenote, are a marvel of background […]



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