Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Merryn's Reviews:

“It’s always now. It’s never now.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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The year is nearly gone, and I’m yet to make my first Cannonball17 post.  Scrolling through my list of 2025 reads, when I saw this I knew it was the one. This is a slim novel, nothing much happens. It took me longer than expected to read, because my mind kept spinning away, following one of its spidersilk threads off into the universe.  Six people orbit the earth sixteen times over the course of a day, their thoughts spiralling from the mundane to the astounding […]

“Possession of history is nine tenths of the future”

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

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It’s nearly the end of 2024, and I have read well beyond my Goodreads target of 52 books, but my review count sits at zero.  Scrolling back through my year’s reading to find a review candidate this one stands out from the British and Australian crime fiction that I have inhaled by the dozen. The title and the cover are misleading.  This is not a cozy book, not a twee tale of senior citizens getting up to some mild hijinks in their twilight years.  This […]

Reader, she married him. I wish she didn’t.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

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Maybe I would have liked this book more if I had read it as a teenager, when I could see myself as Jane Eyre – a plucky young woman who is so intelligent and virtuous that a man the narrative tells us is her soulmate loves her despite her plainness and the social gulf between them.   Probably not though.  Even as a teen I would have rolled my eyes at the pantomime villains of Jane’s childhood, locking her in a ghostridden room for the crime […]

“We have always been more rational than you people.”

Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

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Bingo: Strange Worlds; Passport: Dystopian science fiction I read this brilliant, darkly funny novelette after hearing about it on an episode of Our Opinions are Correct, the science fiction podcast hosted by Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz, that analysed the impact of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfish individualism on the tech industry.  In Rand’s own words: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as […]

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk.”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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Bingo: North America I’m in a few other book-related groups, and whenever this book comes up as a suggestion, there is often a great deal of angst about the setting, in the world of gaming.  It’s as if somehow the main characters meeting and bonding through a love of video games and going on to build a gaming company together will make for a novel that is impenetrable for those who aren’t into gaming, or maybe it’s a form of intellectual snobbery, as if something […]

Mary Sue, the bee

The Bees by Laline Paull

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Bingo: Sex;  Passport: Allegory I guess I was prejudiced against this book from the start.  This year, my home book club is reading a different genre each month and this was the group choice for “fantasy”.  While some reviews compared it to The Hunger Games, or The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was telling that its award nominations were for “women’s fiction” and not fantasy.  I can see why this book was well received.  Life in a beehive is an unusual premise for a novel, […]



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