Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Here is a Story I Have Heard”

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

by Leave a Comment

I read (and enjoyed) Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy last (Ancillary Justice, the first was particularly amazing) so I was surprised to see she had written a fantasy novel.  I enjoy both genres, and I know it isn’t unheard of for authors to switch between genres, but the Radch trilogy had AI and space travel … so definitely what I would consider on the harder side of sci-fi.  The novel’s description was a bit vague so I was very pleasantly surprised when I realized that […]

There Will be a Reckoning.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

by Leave a Comment

Everything of Ann Leckie’s that I have read previously – which is basically every novel she’s published – has been in one form or another, a kind of Space Opera. While Provenance may have had more of a political bent than the more military-minded Imperial Radch books, Ann Leckie has positively been cemented into my mind as very much an ’In Spaaace’ kind of author. Her first fantasy novel – The Raven Tower – has changed this. Leckie has delivered something that is very, very […]

My Chemical Renaissance

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

by 1 Comment

I am an English teacher and, as such, I regularly teach Shakespeare to high schoolers. This is nearly always met with varying degrees of trepidation; even the ones who like literature and who have a good grasp of the English language find his works somewhat daunting and often boring by default. And I get it, I do, but it’s such a shame. Once you get the hang of it and manage to pierce through the – admittedly often dense – language, Shakespeare was an absolute […]

We’ll always be troubled by how things are—that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

by Leave a Comment

By the time this came off the wait-list at the library, I had completely forgotten why my friend had recommended it to me, other than the obvious, which is that I love me some Ian McEwan. And what’s interesting to report now that I’ve read Nutshell is that I may have grown out of my McEwan faze, because this checked a LOT of my boxes but ultimately didn’t blow me out of the water. Which is not to say that this isn’t a beautiful book, […]

High School Seniors read Hamlet for you.

by 3 Comments

I don’t know if you like teenagers, but I do. They’re great; they’re terrible. But I re-read Hamlet for about the 15th time with my AP students and instead of reviewing what I thought about it for the 15th time, here’s what they said about it. The best day of class was when we talked about the “get thee to a nunnery” scene and one of my students called Hamlet a “fuck boy”. I asked them to do a 25-50 word capsule review or an […]

Lady, what are you hollering?

by Leave a Comment

Well, I started the year off with a whimper. This book was glowingly recommended to me by a good friend who has led me in the past to some good stuff, so I jumped on it. I was disappointed, but the let-down was actually a little freeing, because I had just started another book she recommended, and my disappointment in Taking What I Like allowed me to give myself permission to put the other one down.* This is a book of short stories tied together […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo