Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Personhood in Sci-Fi

Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon

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Volatile Memory fulfills the “purple” square on CBR17 bingo. Generally speaking, I don’t consider myself a sci-fi reader, but Volatile Memory kept coming across my feeds because it’s sapphic and I finally gave into the promo, and I’m glad I did because this ended up being a really interesting story. I’d put it in the same conversations as books like Automatic Noodle and The Stars Too Fondly for the ways it explores transness and gender through presentation as well as whether memories make a person […]

Smooth Like Buttah

The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey

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cbrgingo17 Borrow The jacket blurb informed me that Michael Harvey was to Chicago as Raymond Chandler was to Los Angeles.  Cannot personally verify, at least for the Chicago part, but sure seems to be true.  It definitely applies to Chander’s Los Angeles. Michael Kelly, private investigator/ex-cop, gets a case from his former partner on the force.  It’s an eight-year old cold rape and battery case, but it turns out that his old partner was told to forget it ever happened.  And now when that partner […]

“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory—let the theory go.”

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

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After I accidentally read the 4th book in the Poirot series first (which BLEW MY MIND, see review of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). I decided to backtrack and begin at the beginnings. Not only is this the first book about Poirot, it is her VERY FIRST detective novel. The first novel does a great job of introducing us to Poirot in a way where he, and his companion Author Hastings, feel already familiar. Hastings is the Watson to Poirot’s Holmes, the foil who is […]

Birds of a feather

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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CBR Bingo: Culture (this book features first contact between different cultures, and touches on the thematic philosophical question of if destroying a culture is worth it if it means saving the people of that culture). This is the third book in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I have just flown through them all in the past few days. I loved the first two books in the series, so I wanted to start this one almost immediately after finishing Children of Ruin. Much like […]

Do you follow the Beast or your better angels?

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

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Cbr17bingo N Every time I read a Pratchett novel, I am just awestruck, dumbfounded by the way he could write so eloquently and with such warmth and humor about some of the nastiest parts of the human condition. Night Watch, originally published in 2002, really hit me hard because it is just so weirdly timely. I read and reviewed Guards! Guards! (the first of the Watch novels) last year, and I know that there are several other books in the Watch series before Night Watch. […]

Brooklyn Bound

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

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This is a re-read, although in this case it was also a first listen. Not only have I read this novel before, I’ve also read the sequel, Long Island, which came out last year. Without spoiling that book, I will say that the foreknowledge gained from it did cast a pall over this reading of Brooklyn. Another thing hanging over the novel was the film adaptation, which is one of my favorite movies of recent years. That movie, of course, starred Saoirse Ronan, who serves as the […]



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