Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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a fine final read of 2019

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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I first came across Little Women as a child, and I came across it out of order; we had an old cloth-bound copy of Jo’s Boys on the bookshelf in my childhood home. It was next to Treasure Island, which I had devoured, and being a child I assumed that since books were next to each other they must be related. Ooops! I quickly learned the error of my ways (thanks Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library!) and settled down with an old illustrated tome. I was Jo. Who wasn’t […]

Limitless Potential But Is It Actually Good to Know About All the Missed Opportunities?

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When I saw earlier this year that Kristin Cashore had a new novel, I was hesitantly excited.  I loved Graceling, liked Fire, and thought Bitterblue was fine.  Still, it’s never guaranteed that an author can come up with a new idea and world, and create another property as beloved as Graceling. I started writing the review shortly after finishing this book in February, and struggled were to go with it.  I noticed many other reviewers were deliberately vague, and couldn’t figure out how much I […]

“The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you.”

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I’m a sucker for a book that promises to be a mind-bender and has a bunch of people talking about how weird it is. Enter Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. The series is about Area X, a strip of coastline that’s been reclaimed by nature and is being shielded from the general public as a military-protected “ecological disaster site.” In the decades since Area X was formed, various expedition teams have gone through the border with the mission of documenting just […]

The DODO Doorstopper

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‘My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or – let’s face it – Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.’ Having never read anything by Nicole Galland before, I may be speculating, but her influence on Neal Stephenson’s infodump tendencies seems to be a positive […]



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