Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Wrestling with Theology in Short Fantasy Fiction

Pulling the Wings Off Angels by KJ Parker

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I started reading KJ Parker’s Prosper’s Demon as an ARC a few years back. I remember putting it down about halfway through the novella and being fully OK with not continuing it but not having strong feelings about it one way or another. The book has since earned raves. I regularly come across recommendations for it as a readalike for something I really like. I can’t shake that I didn’t like it. I just didn’t. I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t offended by it. I […]

Revelator: Sometimes God is One of Us

Revelator: A Novel by Daryl Gregory

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To risk starting out on an annoyingly pretentious foot, Daryl Gregory is an author I liked before he was cool. I’d been enjoying his work before he broke out into the front tables of bookstores with Spoonbenders, and I feel an affection for his writing and the interesting things he does within the horror/fantasy field. I find him to be a writer like Robert Charles Wilson, a sure-footed storyteller whose name on the cover of a genre novel guarantees an interesting and fast moving read. […]

For all y’all hippie monks

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

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This book has been on my shelf for years. Since we’ve been home more than a month and I have the spiritual space to sit down with this kind of dense nourishment, I finally took the plunge and fully engaged with Thomas Merton. He’s something of a legend to Christian contemplatives, sort of like the Keith Richards of monks. Wise, somewhat cantankerous, expansive and global in his conception of God, God’s purpose, and destiny of people. A hippie monk. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton […]

The original Book

The Good News Bible by God/ Anonymous

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It feels very wrong to write a book review of The Bible, but it would also feel wrong to not get the Cannonball Reads credit for reading it- so here we are!  I’m splitting this review into two, one review for the Old Testament and one review for the New Testament- not only does this make sense thematically, but this way I also get double the book reading credit!  Although my hesitations in writing this review are also many, I’m also hopeful that God, if […]

omg

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I completely adored Aslan’s last book, Zealot, which examined the historical evidence we have for what Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, would have been like when you strip away all the modern beliefs and assumptions. It was incredibly fascinating and Aslan took us through the evidence piece by piece, drawing conclusions or best guesses along the way. Although I enjoyed God, it definitely wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting the same measured look at historical evidence and then conclusions drawn from that […]

I Was the Wrong Audience for this Book

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One of my colleagues asked me to read this book along with him to help him prepare a presentation for his religions and sociology course, and I wanted to like it, for his sake and my own, but I was hands-down the absolute worst audience for this book. This is a volume for someone who’s coming in with no prior knowledge, or knows a little bit about a lot of different religions. I unfortunately know an iceberg’s worth of information on my own religion, and […]



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