Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Math problems on Mars.

Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier

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I said in a status update while reading Singer Distance that it was giving me Contact vibes, and that’s true. The homespun science and grungy academic feel of the book, along with a group of characters working towards contacting aliens does give me the same feelings I get watching that movie (I have the book and I really need to finally read it!), but Singer Distance also has its own unique feel. This is an alternate history where back in the late 1800s, scientists spotted a message on Mars and began […]

“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

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I wish I would have known this was a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov before I purchased this book and got all excited about it. I probably never would have picked it up. There is a reason that I have never read any of Dostoyevsky’s stuff (or Tolstoy for that matter). The Family Chao follows the titular family, owners of a Chinese restaurant in a small town in America. The parents of the family are immigrants from China, and there are three sons. When the […]

I liked this weird little gremlin book.

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

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To be clear, the book isn’t about gremlins, I’m just calling it a gremlin book because it’s weird and small and has claws but is also kind of harmless and laughable in the right light. Also also, gremlin is a fun word to use. This book is impossible to *really* talk about without spoilers, so I’m going to have a pretty big spoiler section and a smaller non-spoiler section in this review. I will try to keep the spoiler section relatively spoiler-free in the sense […]

CBR15 Passport! Book #1 – A book that is Not For Moi.

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

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Oof, this was not for me. Like, so not for me that I maybe shouldn’t even be writing a review, because my brain just bounced off this after about ten pages and then just kept bouncing harder and harder. This is a speculative fiction, experimental novel by British poet Salena Godden about an anthropomorphized version of Death (here called Mrs. Death, personified by an older Black woman) and her connections to/conversations with a person called Wolf. In addition to the the prose actually feeling like […]

“For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.”

Matrix by Lauren Groff

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I do, on occasion, voluntarily read lit-fic, even dare I say, get excited about it! And that is usually when there is some sort of weird hook to the premise. Here, it’s nuns. I’ve had a weird thing with nuns ever since I watched The Trouble With Angels as a child, and I can’t explain it. I think they are funny and interesting and weird, and some of them were completely demented (my mom had a nun teacher in the early 1960s who used to […]

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

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I will admit that I have been avoiding this book since it was published, but especially after I read a Sherlock fanfic one time* that was a riff on Life After Life, and which is one of the most emotionally traumatizing fics I’ve ever read, so by association I was pre-traumatized by this book. Also, one time I read the first Jackson Brodie mystery and I thought it was boring, so I thought this would be boring too. Happily, wrong on all fronts! *If you […]



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