Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Franz Kafka got together with Charles Dickens and wrote an episode of the X-Files based on Little Shop of Horrors

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

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CBR BINGO 14: Funky: Where Steampunk meets your nightmares “The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.” Those two sentences, from the second paragraph of Chapter 1 of Period Street Station, captivated me: the delicious smells of a bustling market intermingling with the filth […]

Behold the communication device of the future!

How It Works: The Telephone by Ladybird Books

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CBR14 BINGO: Series, because this book is part of the Ladybird “How it Works” series published in the 1970s. I never pass a Little Free Library without checking out what’s on offer, and one day a few weeks ago I struck gold. Never has one person’s trash become such a treasure. Thanks to Ladybird Books, I was about to learn about how telephones work, or at least how they worked in 1972. This book begins with some history of the telephone and why we need […]

Dignity

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

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CBR14 BINGO: Adapt, because it was adapted into the wonderful 1993 film of the same name “I’m telling you, sir, you’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. And you never know. A couple  more years and it might be too late.” This advice from a stranger on a country road to the novel’s protagonist is meant to encourage the traveler to walk up a hill and enjoy a beautiful view, but it may as well be an observation about the protagonist’s […]

Cairo, 1912, with magic. Sign me up.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

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CBR 14 BINGO: Rec’d. MsWas recommended this one to me, and I will be recommending it to others. I also saw this recommended on NPR’s list of best sci-fi and fantasy books of the last decade. In 1912 Cairo, collector of antiquities, lover of the exotic, and all around British-colonial caricature Lord Worthington meets with his Brotherhood of al-Jahiz, a group whose noble purpose is to “recover the most sacred wisdom of the ancients, to create a greater tomorrow.” Worthington’s group has taken to collecting […]

“I’m looking for truth. Je church la vé·ri·té”

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

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CBR 14 BINGO: Shadow, because it deals with shedding light on the truth, which is not always what it seems Code Name Verity has been sitting patiently on my TBR for close to 10 years (having first been published in 2012). I snatched it out of a Little Free Library and thought it would be the perfect entry for the Shadow category in this year’s bingo. Reviewing this novel without giving away any spoilers is a little difficult, but not impossible if I focus on […]

I don’t know how a novel with a mechanical octopus could go so wrong

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR 14 BINGO: Time, because there is a watch on the cover, and a watch in the title, and it deals with the way a person’s possible futures can shift through time Note: I’ve included spoilers to explain what it was that I didn’t like about this novel. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street has all the ingredients required to create something I should love: interesting characters, a non-linear interpretation of time, steampunk-esque mechanics, a beautiful cover, a dash of feminism, and an anthropomorphic clockwork octopus. […]



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