Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search

Comprehensive, confusing world-building

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

by 8 Comments

In what has been a bit of a theme for me so far this year, The City in the Middle of the Night took me a pretty long time to get into. I was more than a third through this book before it hooked but but once it got me, oh man, I was IN. It’s one of those books that seems to straddle science fiction and fantasy, with all the intensely new world that requires. Once that barrier is overcome, it’s a wild ride. Two […]

Blackbird swearing in the dead of night

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

by Leave a Comment

What a strange book.  That’s not an insult coming from me, but I think this book suffers from a surfeit of ideas; Anders has A LOT to say here about the intersection of and battle between science and nature, and it all comes out in a book that’s not quite big enough to contain them all, which was the problem I had with her most recent novel that I read earlier this year. Like with that one, there are worse things than too many ideas, […]

Own Voices

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

by Leave a Comment

  This is my Bingo choice for Own Voices and it’s simultaneously a great one and a terrible one in that it is a fictional book written by a transgender lesbian author about the struggles of changing one’s body to reflect a changing understanding of ones self, and the love the protagonist has for her same-sex roommate.  Perfect, right? The body she’s changing into is a non-human one, not because she has never felt at home with herself, but because their telepathic hormonal communication works […]

2018 – I Can’t Quit You

by 1 Comment

This last year, like many Cannonballers, I read more books than I got a chance to review and so this final review of 2018, which will end up being my first review of 2019, is a sort of odds and ends.  Here in no particular order are books that I read while in China, books I read while on vacation in Northern Wisconsin, and books I read during my fall and spring semesters that I just didn’t have time to write about at the time. […]

I did not enjoy it.

by 2 Comments

And I’m pretty bummed about it. I wanted to like it. I liked the first half, in which nerd genius Laurence and young witch Patricia meet in middle school and become half-assed friends. I liked its many, many beautiful lines. I liked young Patricia and to a small degree, adult Patricia. I liked that it was a book by a trans woman that got mainstream attention without her trans-ness being the reason. I liked the cover art. I liked that a nonbinary character who used […]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by 4 Comments

I’ve been dreading writing this review. I just don’t know what to say about this book, because I don’t really know how I feel about it, still, and it’s been months since I finished it. Ultimately, I just don’t think this was the book for me, but that kind of thing doesn’t fill up a review space. It’s also not helpful to anyone reading this review, because only people who pay extremely close attention to my reading habits might have a clue what a “for me” […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo