Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The stories of two young men

Hands by Torrey Maldonado

Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes

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I needed a short read or two. I found two, while terribly short looking, books that also felt like they would have some “meat” to them. And those books were Hands by Torrey Maldonado and Garvey in the Dark by Nikki Grimes. I was familiar with Grimes, as they are the author of Garvey’s Choice and others I enjoyed reading. But Maldonado was new. Hands looked like it would be a boxing book. And it is, somewhat. But really what the book is about are […]

Nanorrobots Prodigiosos?

Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años by Juan José Gómez Cadenas; Juan Botas

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So for my European bingo spot, I’m going to review a science book about humanity’s tangles with viruses that eventually builds to the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘Virus. La guerra de los mil millones de años‘ (‘Virus. The war of a billion years’) is a bit of a curiosity for me: this book about viruses, diseases, and pandemics, which was written with a Spanish perspective in mind, was completed during the very first few months of the pandemic. The authors state in the introduction that the writing […]

“The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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This is a book I wouldn’t have picked up if not for one of my book clubs, and this is exactly why book clubs and stuff that makes you read outside your comfort zone are so fun. This book was so good! A real treat for book-lovers, and for humans who lived through (are living through?) the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t get excited about this one until somebody told me it was about a woman who is haunted by her least favorite bookshop customer, who […]

Take Me. I Am a Scientist. I Also Lift Things

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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This book was a bit of lighthearted fun. It was also a novel with fingerprints of the pandemic all over it. Like many others, Jamie Bell’s life was turned upside down by Covid-19. Dropped from their position as a marketing executive by a local start up, they finds themselves working as a delivery driver while trying to keep their flat-mates afloat. All this changes though with a chance run in with an old classmate named Tom. Tom works for an “animal rights organization” and his […]



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