Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Attention, Murderbot stans: I have a short story for you.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 132 by ed. Neil Clarke

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I downloaded this in 2021 for the Read Harder Challenge but never read it, and no longer remember the challenge I downloaded it for, but I managed to make it fit perfectly into this year’s Read Harder. Efficiency! The issue itself after all of that was a bit of disappointment. I’m noting here at the top that the five-star rating is solely for “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer, a 8,000~ word novelette that won the Hugo in 2018, a win that is […]

“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 […]

STEP.

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

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This was very wholesome. I have been a fan of Gene Luen Yang’s work for a while now, and I try to read all of his graphic novels (I have given up on his superhero comics work; there is too much of it). So when the Read Harder Challenge said I had to read a nonfiction YA comic, I was excited to finally be able to fit this one in. Dragon Hoops is a memoir of Yang’s time shadowing the Bishop O’Dowd High School basketball team […]

“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”

The Three Musketeers (The d'Artagnan Romances, #1) by Alexandre Dumas

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Nobody told me this book would be funny! Well, in case you didn’t know it, this book is funny! I did know it would be ridiculously long, but I did the audiobook, and Bill Homewood was a very fun narrator, and it didn’t feel as long as it could have. For some reason, I’ve always thought this book would be boring, but it’s a swashbuckling adventure Romance, so in hindsight that was a weird opinion to have. Maybe because the cover looks boring, or I’m […]

I wish this wasn’t a thriller.

Forty Acres by Dwayne Alexander Smith

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a Dan Brown-style thriller. Probably since the last Dan Brown book I read (so, 2011? Maybe?). But this is definitely one: Extremely short chapters (most are less than four pages, often they are only one or two); plain, workmanlike prose that cares more about getting the plot up and out there than anything else; shallow characterization; the presence of huge conspiracies involving powerful people. Anyway, that type. Except, Dan Brown does it much better, I’m sad to […]

A book from the year of my birth!

The Suspect (Karl Alberg, #1) by L.R. Wright

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I’m not quite sure how to talk about this one! I had never heard of it before I went searching for a book to fill this specific Read Harder challenge (⇣), and I’d never heard of the author, either. I don’t think it’s because she was Canadian, I think it’s because she was popular in the 80s and early 90s, and then she and her books faded into the place where books go when they aren’t popular anymore and haven’t been inducted into “the canon”. […]



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