Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Necessity of Violence

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution by R.F. Kuang

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I think my mixed feelings are going to come out so I’ll say up front that this is way outside of what I usually read, and while I appreciated that it is a very good book, I often didn’t enjoy reading it. I appreciate it more than I love it. But, I think it’s a worthwhile read. Maybe don’t pick it up right after you put down a book that owns your whole heart. This book is also in conversation with The Secret History and […]

The Last Days of the Free Comanche

Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson

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Captured in a raid, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is adopted by a Comanche couple and becomes integrated into the tribe, given the name Naduah, and eventually grows up to marry a Comanche chief. I love long lush historical fiction, especially older ones that lean more heavily into sprawling plots than most modern books. Ride the Wind delivered on all these fronts, and told a fascinating true story to boot. I enjoyed the style of writing, which was somewhat purple at times but created a vivid sense of […]

“Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are – honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.”

City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Rating four stars (4.5, really) on the side of caution with full knowledge that I could come back here very soon and bump this up to five stars. How many five-star reviews is too many to give out in one month? Anyway, this book was great! This is only the second series I’ve read by Robert Jackson Bennett, but I feel like it might have bumped him up to my favorite authors list. I five-starred both published books in his latest series, so I had […]

“With everyone working together and recognizing each other’s humanity, we will all get to space someday, and we will all have enough.”

Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Delliquanti

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This was another great purchase courtesy of the new YA graphic novel section at my Barnes & Noble! Across a Field of Starlight has everything I want in a book — thoughtful science fiction, an examination of what growing up in a traumatic situation of deprivation vs growing up in a utopian commune situation does to you, interrogation of colonialism, mental health, trans and queer characters (one of the main characters has the pansexual pride flag tattooed on their arm!), body diversity, etc, etc, etc… […]

An AU of Steampunk Egypt, a magical whodunnit, and a great cast of characters. What more could you want?

A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

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BINGO – REC’D by the wonderful narfna, CoffeeShopReader, ElCicco, Emmalita, and witcherwill. Their reviews are all linked above. I encourage you to read all of these great reviews as well. Fatma el-Sha’arawi is an agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities in an alternate history of Egypt in the 1910s. She is called in to investigate the brutal murders of a cult of people who worship al-Jahiz, the man who brought magic and the djinn into the world. Soon enough, a person claiming […]

I love the smell of colonialism in the morning

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

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I was so disappointed in the last two books I read that I decided to shift gears and read something more “weighty.” I’d been missing beautiful writing and thought-provoking content, so I turned to my TBR list for ideas and came up with Heart of Darkness, a short novel that I’d always meant to read but had never gotten around to. It’s an important English novella published in 1899 by a Polish author about a British steamboat captain sailing through Africa; 80 years later it […]



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