Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Everybody said: so? As in so what?

Summer by Ali Smith

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The closing volume of the Seasons Quarter by Ali Smith. Arguably, this is the best or at least most impressive of the books, but I will get to that. The books are not sequels, so you can read them in any order. Instead, each novel focuses on a season (and things attached to that season) and generally try to capture the current moment (as of publication) while also trying to place things within broader contexts or connected thematic moments. So in this book, the absolute […]

He leaned forward, his breath the smell of whiskey drunk straight from the bottle.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Congo by Michael Crichton

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This is a reread for both of these books, but it’s also possible I never read Congo — I did see the movie on HBO while babysitting in like 1997 and it’s truly awful. The book is also, not great, but it is a lot better than the movie. Fight Club, of course, I read right after watching the movie. Fight Club – 4/5 Stars This book mostly still holds up. Like the movie, of course, the satire (WHICH IS NOT SUBTLE ACTUALLY) does not […]

The hegemony consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

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I had a very unclear understanding of what I thought this book was, not by reading about it or looking at reviews for it, but by looking at the original cover. It looks like a kind of sci-fi fantasy novel ala Dune or some other kind of adventure in space. And while there’s elements of that throughout, the book ended up being so much smarter, better written, and a number of other things as I started to understand what I was reading. We begin aboard […]

In the myriadic year of our Lord–the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!–Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir

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While it took me awhile to sort my way through the early morass of the world-building and language of the first chapter, I ended up enjoying this novel a lot, while still feeling annoyed at some of the too cleverness that often inhabits playful sci fi and fantasy (Brandon Sanderson is deeply enamored with overly cutesy and playful “repartee” at times, and so is this novel as well too often). So the world we’re looking at involves a series of nine aristocratic houses inhabiting nine […]

Dancing all alone, feeling nothing good

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

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This is the debut novel by Sherman Alexie, who had already put out a near perfect short story collection: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven a little earlier. I always think about Alexie as being a very talented writer, but it’s interesting to consider that because his output is varied in terms of type, the over all collective oeuvre is a little harder to assess. This novel begins with the blues musician Robert Johnson making his way onto the Spokane Indian reservation and […]



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