Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The closer you are to life, the closer you are to death, her grandmother had told her.”

Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling

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When I was looking for a historical fiction written by an indigenous author I knew right where to go because back in 2021 the Indigenous Reading Circle was featured in a Reading Women Podcast Reading Challenge, and I’ve been following them on Instagram ever since. This year they are highlighting native women in fiction and Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling, a complicated coming of age set on the Flathead Reservation in the 1940s, was their February selection.  The story follows Louise White Elk as she approaches adulthood. […]

Golden Girls with Guns

Killers of a Certain Age: A Novel by Deanna Raybourn

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Back in 2010 a Bruce Willis movie called Red (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) came out. I don’t especially love action movies but this one was great — a comedy action movie with a load of outstanding actors in it, including John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, and Helen Mirren. They all play retired secret agents whom Willis convinces to come out of retirement when he finds himself targeted by mysterious forces. Helen Mirren was my favorite as a bad ass weapons expert who has been running a genteel […]

Listen to me or don’t. But if you don’t, you’ll be dead. And then where will you be? Dead, that’s where.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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The failure mode of clever is ‘asshole.’ ― John Scalzi, Redshirts If knew you were going to drug me, kidnap me, and take me back to the dark ages with out my pants, I never would have slept with you. ― John Scalzi, Redshirts Andy Dahl has seen plenty of strange things. A former acolyte of an alien religion, Andy was scooped up by the Universal Union when the religious factions on his adopted planet went to war. Now, with a couple of years of […]

Fugitive Telemetry

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

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Fugitive Telemetry is Murderbot’s bottle episode. Murderbot is adjusting to life within PreservationAux, and has been asked for its help in judging the extent of a security incident. Murderbot is forced to interact with people who know about sec units but haven’t had the chance to learn about this sec unit yet, and as such there is the usual prejudice and the attempts to make it seem like just a killing machine, which it also thinks it is, after all. This book is primarily just an […]

The magic of these worlds is fading for me, but I’ll keep trying…

In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

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If you aren’t familiar with this series, it begins with Every Heart a Doorway, a novella about Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. West runs a boarding school for children who have been to other worlds and returned unable to readjust to regular life. Every Heart a Doorway introduces a lot of children who have traveled to these worlds, but doesn’t really flesh out individual stories. McGuire’s subsequent books explore these individual stories. One of the great things about this series is that you don’t […]

Choosing to create a full life despite being imprisoned by circumstances

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

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A Gentleman in Moscow was my book club’s pick for February, otherwise I likely would never have picked it up.  Amongst our tiny group one person noped out, one person was struggling 100 pages in (unknown if they finished it), but I found myself curious and kept going.  While the writing could ramble, sometimes giving asides that have no pertinence to the story, I found myself drawn into the tiny world of Count Alexander Rostov sentenced to live the rest of his life at the Metropol […]



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