Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Brave New World. Meh.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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I’ve been curious about this book for a long time. 1984 by George Orwell was one of my favorite books as an adolescent, and Brave New World is often mentioned in the same breath. So when I found a Brave New World mini-series, I thought I’d check it out.  The mini-series stars Jessica Brown Findlay (Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey), Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen from GOT), and Alden Ehrenreich (Young Han Solo from Solo), and it tells the story of a “utopic” future London where […]

The Importance of the Library

Deal With the Devil by Kit Rocha

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Bingo 18: Shelfie I knew there was going to be some romance going into Deal with the Devil, but I was really hoping the series title “Mercenary Librarians” would be more the focus. Sadly for me, this was definitely more romance than librarian-ness. Set in a somewhat generic dystopic US potentially within my lifetime (maybe, assuming I get close to the triple digit age) after humanity has been devastated by some massive solar flare activity (I liked how this was put in; not a big […]

Kind of a letdown to a strong start

Dust by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] NANOBOTS. I’m going to be honest – I skipped a bunch of pages in this one. My affection for Wool had started wearing off by this time and not even Juliette’s return could pull me back into the narrative enough to get me fully invested. I still like the overall world here, but there’s just so many holes after Shift. A lot of the menace of the outside world is gone, the rituals of IT are no […]

A middling middle

Shift by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] Note: This edition is the collection of three novellas. This is essentially the prequel to Wool, and serves to explain how and why the silos were built and what has happened to the outside world by the time of Wool. It takes place in two different timelines — one follows Donald Keene, a young Georgia congressman in 2049, tapped to help construct a new nuclear waste storage facility in the area outside Atlanta. The other follows Troy, a silo […]

But did they try more cowbell?

Severance by Ling Ma

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In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good/adequate/completed review, I’m just going to try and get my thoughts down about this book. Severance was one of my it’s->$4.99-on-Kindle-so-if-I-have-even-the-vaguest-interest-I-will-buy-it impulse purchases. I read the critics’ reviews on Amazon and friends’ ratings on Goodreads, skimmed the free sample to get a sense of what it was about, and was hooked. Unfortunately, my interest had waned by about the third chapter. Severance, which was written in 2018, takes place in 2011 and […]

“from the housetops to the gutters – from the ocean to the shore -the warning signs have all been bright and garish -far too great in number to ignore”

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

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The children have a game: keep their parental status secret. If they keep it secret from each other, they can keep it secret from themselves. They won’t have to be the “children of” anyone. They don’t have to claim allegiance with the drunks in the Great House who let the world burn. Their game, and much of this book in general, brought to mind strong memories of “Old College Try” by The Mountain Goats. A Children’s Bible is more than what it seems. It’s presented […]



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