Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Zirza's Quick Questions interview.)

Zirza's Reviews:

Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale almost invariably start like a collective trauma memory: where were you when it happened? I was twenty-ish, an English major at a nearby university. I was taught how to analyse literature, but not how to consume it, how to distinguish it, and I don’t think we ever read this one for class. Needless to say, most of my professors were middle-aged men. I did read it, though, and it stuck with me; I read it again a few years later. […]

Scuttlebut

Network Effect (Murderbot #5) by Martha Wells

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Murderbot is at it again. Once more, he is keeping his favourite humans (or at the very least, humans that it doesn’t hate) safe as they do exploration work. On the return, though, their ship is hijacked and dragged into a wormhole by none other than ART (short for Asshole Research Transport), Murderbot’s erstwhile friend and companion. ART is a research transport with massive computational capabilities, able to outsmart virtually everyone – so why has it been hijacked by a strange lifeform? Once again, Murderbot’s […]

The Local and the Yokel

A Great Deliverance (Inspector Lynley no.1) by Elizabeth George

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In a small town in the English countryside, the head of a well-liked local farmer is violently separated from his body. Holding the axe that facilitated the act is his daughter Roberta, sitting nearby and exclaiming her lack of regret over it all. But things don’t add up, and Scotland Yard sends inspector and eighth earl of Pudsey-Le-Stodge Thomas Lynley to crack the case. He is accompanied by bundle of nerves and 8th season Eastenders character Barbara Havers. Can Havers put aside her dislike for […]

“Time remembered does not flow smoothly at all”

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

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Jess is the middle child of a large, chaotic family and she feels largely ignored, so when she finally heads off to university, it comes as a relief. It takes her a while to find her groove, but then she meets her friends. There is glamorous, upper-crusty Georgie, attractive and steady Nick, and Georgie’s mysterious boyfriend Alec. Above all, there is Jess’s primary reason for her studies: teacher and author Lorna. Lorna has written a very successful and much-lauded novel called The Truants, and Jess […]

Putting the Ire in Ireland

The Drowned by John Banville

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Autumn is beginning to make its entry in rural Ireland. An expensive car stands in the middle of a field. An oddly-dressed man runs up, tells a passer-by and the inhabitants of a nearby house that his wife has left the car after a tiff and has jumped off a cliff, drowning herself into the chilly Irish sea. But something is off, and the man’s behaviour is suspicious. Days pass, and the woman is not found. It is unclear if she has ever even existed. […]

Sometimes I’d like to send murderbot into other books just to spice things up and see what would happen. 

Rogue Protocol (Murderbot #3) by Martha Wells

Exit Strategy (Murderbot #4) by Martha Wells

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6) by Martha Wells

No One Was Supposed to Die at this Wedding by Catherine Mack

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Rogue Protocol (Murderbot #3) Exit Strategy (Murderbot #4) Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6) I never know what to say about these books. I like them. Are they all the same? Yeah, kind of. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. Murderbot goes places, Murderbot investigates, Murderbot is awkward around humans. It’s like a cozy mystery set in space. I liked Fugitive Telemetry most, because it’s where we get the most interaction between Murderbot, the people who know him, and those who meet him for the […]



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