Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

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Citadel of the Autarch – 4/5 This is a re-read of the book and this time through an audiobook. It’s now the the fourth book in the series and we pick up right at the end of last book. Severian has been drained after a big fight in the last book and is wandering along when he finds a dead solider. He brings them back to life with the Claw and then continues north where a battle is in its early formation. Severian joins the […]

Round up 1

Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

A Window into Time by Peter F Hamilton

The 10th Victim by Robert Sheckley

The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

Keep Moving by Maggie Smith

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino

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The Sword of the Lictor – 4/5 I might be getting a little series fatigue on these books. It doesn’t help the matter that this is the second time I am reading these books. I am doing that because while I have read them before I am trying reconcile my feelings of them with the rave reviews I read online. The thing I most like about the books is that the world they inhabit feels very strongly like the kind of world I would love […]

Some

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

Hiroshima by John Hersey

Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

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The Penelopiad – 4/5 This short book was written as part of a mythology fiction project in the early 00s where contemporary writers took on classic myths. Karen Armstrong wrote an overall history of mytholy, David Grossman wrote about Samson and Delilah, AS Byatt wrote about Ragnorok. As she did with the Shakespeare project when she wrote Hag-Seed based in The Tempest, she knocked the ball out of the park with this one. I think this is in part because she already has written numerous […]

Grab Bag

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff

Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece Pancake

Child of God by Cormac Mccarthy

Candide by Voltaire

A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman

On Animals by Susan Orlean

The Facts by Philip Roth

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In Pharoah’s Army -4/5 The second memoir by Tobias Wolff (known for A Boy’s Life too) but covering his time in Vietnam. This memoir reads a lot like a Vietnam novel — faint with memories, covering topics, and episodic. It’s hard not to compare it to Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried (a “novel”) and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship me Home (a memoir). In those two books Tim O’Brien likes to hide. There’s a few moments where […]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe (1972)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

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This book is called a novella collection numerous times on the cover and in the promotional material, and well, it’s a novel. There’s a thematic and setting consistency throughout the book that is cohesive and connected in such a way, it’s almost like a publisher told Gene Wolfe that the book had to be called novellas. It’s no less a novel than Go Down Moses (though my comparison stops there). This is my fifth Gene Wolfe book, and I am still a little confused as to whether […]

I had never seen war, or even talked of it at length with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of violence…

The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

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This is the final book of the main series of the Book of the New Sun, as told in this volume and three others. Like the previous ones, this one is presented as a kind of found-text in a foreign language and translated by Gene Wolfe. That framing device works as far as you’re not too interested in how a book that supposedly takes place 1,000,000 years into the Earth’s future is found and translated by a contemporary writer. Maybe like a timeloop or something. […]



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