Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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May-July Leftovers

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History by Rory Carroll

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

Under Color of Law by Aaron Philip Clark

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Tripwire by Jack Reacher

Baby Moll by John Farris

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Thomas Boyle

The Laundromat: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich

X by Davey Davis

Our Last Season: A Writer, A Fan, A Friendship by Harvey Araton

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham

Ex Machina Book Four by Brian K. Vaughan

Jacket Weather by Mike DeCapite

Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond

That Kind of Danger by Donna Masini

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Spenser Confidential by Ace Atkins

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon, I Mean Noel by Ellen Raskin

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

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I usually do these at the end of the month but then I went through a big reading slump March-May. And then I roared back but realized I was behind. So apologies for this being so long. There Will Be Fire **** A good, readable text on a moment in history I knew little about. Even after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, I still had a lot of problem keeping track of all the socio-political dynamics so it’s good that Rory Carroll makes it accessible […]

Disappointing

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm

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Best for: I’m really not sure, and I’ll get to that in the review. In a nutshell: Author (and climate activist) Malm attempts to argue in favor of stronger action by the public where it comes to climate change and fossil fuel. Worth quoting: “We face an ostensible paradox here, in that the US is a vastly more violent society — as measured by the diffusion of guns, the incidence of mass shootings, the civilians killed by police, the veneration of armed heroes in popular […]

Grief and Hope – the human experience

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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BINGO – New This is going to be a difficult book to summarize because I would not consider it a novel. It’s closer to a collection of short stories, but that’s not quite right either. It’s something in between. There’s a long form improv format in which the audience sees a scene with Person A and Person B. Something in that scene sparks an idea for a scene tangentially connected between Person B and Person C. Then a connected scene between Person C and D, […]

From the Plains of Texas to the Mountains of India

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

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The thing that I don’t think people who have not read Neal Stephenson understand about his writing is that it is pulpy and action packed. They see the size of a book like Termination Shock, read the description, and think—oh this is gonna be some heavy shit. And sure, he does go into multi-page digressions about whatever his current research obsession is, but that is also interspersed with plane crashes and people shooting boars out of helicopters. He starts Seven Eves with blowing up the […]

The nature of witches is to be self aware without follow through, apparently

The Nature of Witches by Rachel Griffin

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Witches are doing what they can to protect the climate and environment of the world, but non-witches continue to act in destructive ways. Extreme weather events are becoming more and more common, and the witches of the world don’t have enough power to keep everyone safe and return stability to the world because these extreme weather events are happening out of season: blizzards in summer, hurricanes in winter, tornados year round, etc. And since each witch is tied to the season they were born in, […]

“I saw the forest burn, when I was young.”

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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CBR13Bingo: Flora If this book does not win a ton of awards, I will be truly disappointed. Climate change science fiction (I’ve heard it called cli-fi but I’m not sold on that name) isn’t anything new, as evidenced by last year’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and N.K. Jemisin’s stellar “Emergency Skin.” But where this author truly excels is twisty plot and excellent characterization. Where most of those stories felt like far in the future scifi, this one felt in many ways startling immediate. “Our ancestors […]



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