Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Are we going for an anchor or a compass? A memory to ground you, or a spark to guide you forward?”

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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In early April I made the choice to put my limited free time (so, so limited in late March and early April) into a complete rewatch of Game of Thrones before the series came back for its final series. I also picked up and put down two different books earlier this month, just not feeling any of them. When it was time to travel for Easter, with a total of four flights, I reached for a sure-fire winner: A Closed and Common Orbit. I loved […]

Interesting concept, no interesting characters

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I couldn’t figure out where to even begin writing a plot synopsis for this dense monster of a book, so I checked Amazon and Goodreads to see if there was a recap I could start with. They were all three paragraphs long or more, and that would be my whole review! So apparently nobody knows how to summarize this mess. Let’s see. A few ‘special’ misfits exist in our time, able to see all possible paths from all possible actions and skip to the best […]

Okay, But I Have Questions

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So, this series apparently got a lot of hype when the first book, The Passage, first came out.  I was, presumably, living under a rock at the time, and so hadn’t heard of it.  In fact, I didn’t really hear about the series until the final book came out, at which point I decided to read them all. And, well, the first half of the first book was great, the second half was good. The second book was okay, verging on bad and the third book was […]

Pseudoscience and Nonsense

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Man, this book was not good. Maybe not terrible (although, maybe terrible), but really not good.  The premise was okay, but the writing was almost painfully bad.  No, it wasn’t as bad as the dumpster fire that is Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards (I’m linking to it not so you’ll read it, but so you can see the cover & know to never, ever pick it up). And it was marginally better than the very poorly written America Pacifica (again, please don’t read, just be aware […]

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

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A Virtual Soul by Kevin Teixeira (1999) NEVER have I felt more compelled to skim a 500-page science fiction story.  This guy could teach a few things to George R. R. Martin about how to avoid story progression.  It seemed like a likable premise – in the near future, genetically bred sub-humans (called Tubies because they are created in test tubes) are a separate race of submissive servants and a very competitive market because they only live seven years.  One hyper-competitive business creates a virus […]



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