Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Twice (or More) in a Lifetime

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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CBR11Bingo: Science! You ever read a book that feels just a little too much like a treatment for a film script? In Blake Crouch’s Recursion, the focus is almost entirely on its high-concept, easy to pitch plot. The characters are briefly sketched to the point where it’s easy to imagine almost any two actors playing the main roles in an adaptation. The writing is competent but unchallenging, making for a quick read without much in the way of metaphor. Maybe that’s too critical. After all, […]

I had a lot of ideas for this review….and then I waited two weeks to write it.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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CBR11 Bingo – Science, because this is a science-centered science fiction novel. I should stay on top of these books. By the time I sit down to review them, they’ve already started to fade from my mind. I drove to New York last summer, and used Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter to fill most of the trip. I enjoyed the book enough to pick up his Wayward Pines series (which I didn’t enjoy quite as much). Seeing that he had a new book out, I jumped […]

“We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

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Happy New Year Cannonballers! Last year, despite achieving my goal of 120 books read and reviewed, I read about 20 books less than during Cannonball 9 which I attribute to spending a lot of time on books I either didn’t finish (Between the Bridge and the River) or spent more time than was necessary sloughing through (Map of Days). My goal this year, besides a humble Double Cannonball, is to allow myself to make quicker decisions regarding books I don’t want to finish. Luckily, I […]

A Trippy Sci-Fi Thriller

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“Dark Matter” is a sci-fi thriller with a side of romance (but in a good way). Jason Dessen is a physicist at a small college in Chicago. That is until he’s kidnapped, drugged, and wakes up in a world that is familiar and foreign all at the same time. Soon he realizes that the only way he can get back to his world is to remember what anchors him to his reality: his wife and son. Thus begins his journey back to his world and […]

Science fiction with a little quantum physics thrown in

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I found Dark Matter by Blake Crouch on NPR’s List of Best Books of 2016. I think I was trying to break out from my rut of favorite genres and try a little science-fiction. Every once in a while, a science-fiction book will grab my imagination and keep my attention, but it doesn’t happen very often. Dark Matter immediately drew me in, and I was hoping I would love it. Unfortunately, as the story went on, I became frustrated with the characterization and the science. This was a unique and memorable […]

Tesseracts freak me out, guys

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It’s strange, but true. I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid and loved it, but trying to figure out tesseracts made me a bit stressed out. Dava Sobel’s The Planets, with it’s good explanations of a mind boggling solar system, did the same thing. And then we come to Crouch’s Dark Matter, which also talks about the creation of a multiverse. It’s too much for my simple brain – it’s all basically infinity and I just can’t comprehend and it actually makes […]



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