Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Fascinating Philosophy and Science in an OK Story

The Quantum Revelations by Stuart Heinrich

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I’m immensely appreciative of Stuart Heinrich for undertaking quite a project – sharing complex and niche scientific ideas such as physical relativism and quantum cosmology with a general audience of sci-fi/speculative fiction readers in novel form. Think The Celestine Prophecy, but for science! Heinrich has previously published non-fiction articles on similar topics, and The Quantum Revelations is his attempt to integrate these areas of study into fiction. The plot is fun. In the near future, climate change rapidly accelerates past the point of no return. […]

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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/

The Midnight Library: Surprisingly uplifting

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

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The Midnight Library follows a woman name Nora Seed who has a pretty sad life: dead end job, bad apartment, dead cat, no friends, dead mom. So she decides to take her own life by overdosing. After laying down to die, she finds herself in this kind of interstitial space of a weirdly magical library with infinite books of all the infinite lives she could have lived. The librarian is a woman from her past, Mrs. Elm, who helped her through her father’s death. Mrs. […]

What is now? What is the story of now/Nao?

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For the Time Being has two parallel narratives: Nao is a teenager in Japan, writing a journal that she states is her suicide note; and Ruth, a writer in an island off British Columbia, who has found Nao’s journal, along with some letters and other artifacts, washed ashore. As Ruth reads Nao’s diary, we find out Nao’s story: she lived most of her childhood in Sunnyvale, California while her father worked at a dotcom, and upon returning to Japan, she did not fit in. Her classmates […]

A Tale for the Time Being

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A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, writers and readers, writer’s block and reader’s block, hate and love. It moves fluidly through the past and present and involves some dynamic and admirable female protagonists. Small wonder it was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize (and should have won instead of The Luminaries). The narration moves back and forth between Ruth, a present-day middle-aged writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, […]



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