Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“We knew it was coming, but we behaved inconsistently.”

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Reading Emily St. John Mandel is like falling asleep to the sound of rain: The words wash over you and a steady drumbeat of beauty lulls you into something like perfect contentment. Just reading the loveliness of her sentences would be enough, but then she continues to dazzle by leading your thoughts into new possibilities about the universe, as your mind is apt to drift to questions of cosmic import in the moments before sleep, while those steady drops beat against your windowpane. It’s hard […]

These were 100% cover reads, but they (mostly) ended up being great!

The Tiger Came to the Mountains (The Trespass Collection, #1) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Wildlife (The Trespass Collection, #2) by Jeff VanderMeer

The Backbone of the World (The Trespass Collection, #3) by Stephen Graham Jones

Stag (The Trespass Collection, #4) by Karen Russell

A Righteous Man (The Trespass Collection, #5) by Tochi Onyebuchi

Bloody Summer (The Trespass Collection, #6) by Carmen Maria Machado

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As mentioned in this post’s title, I saw these covers and immediately went OOOOH. Click click click. Free? Okay! Also, the idea of various genres of story that deal with nature and wildlife clashing with humans appeals to me. I did four of them by audio, and all four narrators were excellent (even for the one I two-starred), and two by Kindle. If you have Prime, they are free for you. Some of them really surprised me! “Wildlife,” by Jeff VanderMeer — 2 STARS This […]

“Evil isn’t a person,” he said. “It’s not a political group either. Or a religion like some people think. Evil is a force. Like gravity. It acts on all of us. We’re all vulnerable to it.”

What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins

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This was a perfectly good book, but it could have been better for me. I broke my no lit-fic rule and put this on my TBR even before the second IRL book club I’m in chose this for later this year. The combination of the book being set in the mystery-adjacent aftermath of a tragedy (a murder-suicide between two teenaged boys), a sixteen year old girl who shows up pregnant afterwards, and the two remaining parents of the dead boys being neighbors just sounded way […]

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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I did not expect to love this book so much, but it really hit me pretty hard. I liked Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut just fine, it was fun, and I really liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but I didn’t connect to it emotionally like I did God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Near the beginning of the book, there’s a moment when Eliot Rosewater is thinking about Vonnegut’s stand-in writer character, Kilgore Trout, who is Eliot’s favorite author (see quote below, which also applies to sci-fi and fantasy […]

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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Been putting off this review because this book is too smart for me. Or, actually, all the characters and maybe the author want to be smarter than me. I am pretty smart! I just have different priorities than everyone in this book. I don’t know about Donna Tartt, it could go either way with her. I still haven’t decided if she secretly empathizes with all these assholes she birthed from her mind, or if she’s skewering people and ideas and places instead. Either, way, this […]

“Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.”

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

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I actually really enjoyed this retelling of The Tempest*, particularly since I had just re-read the play as a refresher, so it was a lot easier to catch all the references and parallels. This is actually only my third Margaret Atwood book, which feels weird, since she is everywhere, and also because I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale three times. About time I branched out! (I’m sorry, Malin, I still haven’t read The Blind Assassin, which is a book I know you love.) *Thanks to andtheIToldYouSos […]



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