Cannonball Read 9

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

The End of Everything and How We Got There

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) – I fear this review will make this book seem much more convoluted than it really is, but I’m going to try and give it the credit it’s due.  The premise is a simple one: there’s been a worldwide pandemic where most of humanity is dead and the few survivors in the twenty years that follow fight brigands, cultists, and a world slowly devolving into barbarism.  Technology is gone, borders no longer exist, medicine is a memory.  But people of hope still exist. In this bleak world, the Symphony travels from one […]

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5/19/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:23 |

Questing with snakes

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

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This one was recommended by fellow Cannonballers/Pajibans when I requested help finding women sci-fi writers, and I am so glad! It was post-apocalyptic and interesting and original. I had read some McIntyre before, but not this one. Snake is a healer, traveling around and helping people in villages that are too small to have their own resident healer. She works with three snakes, using their poison to combat cancers or other diseases, and using the ultra-rare dreamsnake to ease pain until the end in the cases she can’t cure. When her dreamsnake is killed by a panicked villager, she sets […]

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5/2/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:11 |

“They bred dogs for everything else…why didnt they breed them to live longer?”

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

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Yet another post-apocalyptic novel set in the not too distant future. I know. It’s like every fifth book written these days is set during the end of humanity. I suppose that says something about the fatalism of America in a post 9/11, post-truth world. But this isn’t the Walking Dead. There isn’t a zombie in sight, in fact. The Dog Stars is more The Thin Red Line meets The Road. It’s a somber reflection of the end of the world, at times haunting and told in a lyrical but sparse prose. If you were to bottle the essence of a Terrence Malick and […]

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3/10/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:17 |

An Exercise in How Not to Write Post-Apocalyptic Gender Segregated Societies

The Gender Game (Volume 1) by Bella Forrest

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This book is festival of horrors. If I could give it negative five stars I would. If for some terrible reason you want to read it don’t read this there will be spoilers. It’s a YA novel and as such there is a certain amount of teenage angst that has to be begrudgingly accepted. I understand that there is a formula to YA novels I have read quite a few myself, but I had just read two pretty lengthy nonfiction books, 100 pages of microbiology, and 100 pages of organic chemistry theory so I was looking for some light reading […]

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1/17/2017 | 's CBR9 Review No:3 |

Officially did not finish list of 2016

Dracula; Patriot Games; One Second After by Bram Stoker; Tom Clancy; William Forstchen

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So, I’m totally stealing this idea from NTE. These are the books I attempted, but wasn’t able to finish (for one reason or another). I really like the idea of including these books in my Cannonball, if for no other reasons than they still warrant some discussion. In no particular order: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (4 stars) I loved Stoker’s writing, and the book had a beautifully sinister atmosphere to it. It’s not hard to understand, reading this, why the book resonated so strongly with people, and has been passed down through the ages, again and again, retold and reformulated […]

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12/31/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:110 |

Epic book is epic.

The Stand by Stephen King

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YOU GUYS, HI. THIS BOOK WAS SO THIS BOOK. WHAT WORDS TO USE I DO NOT KNOW. MUCH FLOUNDERING. BOOK HAS CREATED NOOK FOR ITSELF IN BRAIN AND IMPRINTED DEMON SHADOW IN NEURAL CELLS FOREVER. CAUSES TO TYPE ALL CAPS OH NO. Okay, I’ll stop now. But seriously. THIS BOOK, THIS @(*&#$%* BOOK. I have been meaning to read The Stand for yearrrrs now, but I kept putting it off. Ever since I discovered about four to five years ago that Stephen King’s storytelling was my jam (after years of being convinced I would hate it, because scary), it’s been […]

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7/6/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:82 |

Still alive

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

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The Girl with All the Gifts breathes life into its genre with a fresh angle on the pathology of an outbreak and an ending that I truly did not expect. The story opens at a noticeably unconventional school/dormitory, where the pupils are carefully monitored and restrained when they are not locked in their individual cells. Our primary protagonist, Melanie, is one such pupil, a bright girl of about ten who loves learning, particularly math and stories of Greek mythology. Her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, encourages the children creatively and is willing to go a bit off curriculum in the name […]

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2/23/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:15 |

Keep calm and — bloody hell, it’s The Happening!

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndam

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I absolutely adored this book. But not in the way I typically do. Wyndam does not paint a rich tapestry of a post-apocalyptic England, nor is he particularly adept at creating complex and layered characters. But he masterfully accomplishes what so many current writers flail at mindlessly: a believable world that feasibly explores the varying degrees in which people abandon their ideas of what society can be in the aftermath of cataclysm. But this was written in 1951. The veterans of WWII had yet to grey, and the future soldiers of Vietnam were still in diapers. The Cold War was […]

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1/30/2016 | 's CBR8 Review No:10 |

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