Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I don’t know who wandered more: the book or me writing this review

Tongues, Volume 1 by Anders Nilsen

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Tongues, Vol. 1 by Anders Nilsen   I have NO idea what was read. The stories all bounce all over the place. The images are busy, the text mixes and gets lost in the illustrations. The images are colorless but are not black and white. The characters are unlikable, even Astrid, who might be the one that will save the world. Or destroy it. It’s still up in the air. There is nothing good and positive. Even The Prisoner has faults and he seems to […]

“When someone describes a man as harmless, he ends up being a villain.”

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Dark Corner selection – February 26 Defeat the Goblin – The pebble book – a book that was gifted to you Monthly Keyword 26: Sun Nowhere Book Bingo 26: A book with multiple POVs Read the Rainbow: Black This is a book with a number of different POV characters. There is Serapio, a blind young man whom we first encounter as a child, being horribly mutilated by his mother (who subsequently throws herself off a building). All this horrific violence is to make him a […]

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam for layfolks

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin

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Every now and again, there’s a picture of David Tenant that pops up on social media where he’s taking a selfie at a con, and there’s some guy just next to him with his nose in his phone. The caption is almost always some suggestion of what the other guy is missing being that close to a celebrity and not knowing it.  Here’s my version of that, kind of. I kind of remember the final time I graduated that the Commencement speaker was referred to […]

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a […]

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—“I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.”

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

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* from a purely Western religion-focused viewpoint.   It was interesting to read about mainly Judaism/Christianity written by someone who was raised Episcopalian, became a Born-Again Christian and then chucked it all in to become an Atheist/Agnostic. Wanted to say to him “You think you’ll get letters over not believing in Heaven, Hell, or life after death? Not over the fact that you state Jesus was just some random Jewish prophet, and not in any way the Son of God? That won’t get a few […]

Big Damn Robot Heroes, Sir

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

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I don’t compare things to Firefly lightly, especially when they’re not set in space. But darned if this book didn’t give Firefly vibes the whole time “Rusty Robot Face” by Anonymous Account is licensed under CC BY 2.0 . Exhibit A: The War, by which I mean the war between robots and humanity that so many folks worry about. The robots win, but robot utopia doesn’t last very long. Our heroine, Brittle, was in The War, and flashes back on it often; even though she was on the […]



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