Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

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Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

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Years ago, I mentioned in the CBR comments that I was interested in learning more about the beauty of math, but that I was awful at math.  Some benevolent commentator told me that Charles Seife’s Zero was a great book about the beauty of math for a lay person. I can’t remember the person who told me that, but I’m appreciative of the recommendation. After years of sitting on my digital shelf, late last year this piece of niche non-fic finally got its time in […]

https://cannonballread.com/2022/02/zero-the-biography-of-a-dangerous-idea-halbs/

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

CBR12 Book Bingo – Yellow

Recursion by Blake Crouch

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I discovered Blake Crouch in the Book of the Month Club, where I saw his books featured in the “Members Most Loved” category. Once I dug into Recursion, I immediately saw why. Crouch writes books that are smart, twisty, and feature fully-developed characters, creating a trifecta that leaves the reader wanting more. I don’t normally lean toward science-fiction, but Crouch has almost single-handedly made me a fan of the genre. In Recursion, a mysterious phenomenon begins to pop-up throughout the population that causes its victims […]

A wonderful surprise-an intelligent, articulate science graphic novel

The Dialogues by Clifford V. Johnson

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I attend a science fiction/fantasy convention every year and during one of the panels on the Physics of the Avengers this past year, the speaker recommended this graphic novel, which was written by a friend of his. Hard science explanations in a graphic novel format intrigued me, but I was unsure if it would actually work over the entire work. While it drags in some places, I really enjoyed this graphic novel. There isn’t a coherent story, but rather the author chooses to use the […]

A truly stunning sci-fi book for the ages

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Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]

Writing Science Fiction #LikeAGirl

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During the past few days, a couple of interesting stories crossed my screen and they are so perfectly related to my current review that they simply must be referenced. First came the #LikeAGirl campaign from Always, encouraging us to turn that pejorative expression into a compliment. Then came this story from NPR about women writers in science fiction: Women are Destroying Science Fiction and That’s OK — They Created It. As I have just finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed, I must say […]



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