Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Very Recommended Exploration of the Renaissance

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer

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The book that got me to purchase an e-reader! The paperback edition of this is a brick and I couldn’t handle hauling it around anymore, but I really was enjoying it and wanted to finish it. The e-reader made this possible, and I am pleased to say that I now have a much better grasp of this period and the historiography around it. The Renaissance is not my specialty so I learned a ton from this book. Ada Palmer does a fantastic job at showing […]

Ada Palmer (1)

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

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“You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred year removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century,  heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed with recent revolution, so it is only  in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.” I think it’s […]

This is my white whale if I were Ahab, and Ahab sort of went up to Moby Dick and gently poked it with a spear and then backed away over and over again for months, and the whale just sat there looking at him, going, seriously? #CBRBingo – White Whale

The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3) by Ada Palmer

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This one was a trial. I read the first book in this series back in August of 2017. It overwhelmed me, and I waited over six months before I read the second one, which added trauma on top of the whelming. At this point, book three was out, and I knew I’d had a hard time remembering details because of the wait I’d created for myself in between books one and two, so the smart thing was to go straight into three. I had it […]

Re-read review of the first two books, and also more people still need to read this series so I can have someone to talk about it with!!

Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1) by Ada Palmer

Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2) by Ada Palmer

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This is a re-read review for the first two books in this series, which were originally written as one volume, and then split in two before publication. After reading them back to back for the first time, I can definitely say they work much better together as one story than they did the first time I read them, almost a year apart from each other. The arc of the story—the rising tension, climax, resolution—is much more clear and satisfying when they are read together. My […]

It got me another bingo at least

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

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Bingo square: Award Winner. It won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 2017 and Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. In the distant future, war is a thing of the past. A utopia, fast car transport has meant countries are no longer boundaries. You can live in Italy and work in the US and go to school in Australia. People no longer belong to nations but Hives, chosen for their best fit to personality and beliefs. Nor do nuclear families exist, […]

How Far Would You Go to Protect What is Important?

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Well, do not swear. Although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract tonight. It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say “It lightens.” Juliet to Romeo, Act 2, scene 2   Last year, narfna reviewed Too Like the Lightning and requested that we all read it. I was intrigued, but the book wasn’t close enough to my price point of free. Fortunately, Tor.com offered it as a free […]



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