Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Bit Character Speaks

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

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I’d say this is a 3.5 star book that I’m rounding up! I really enjoyed the whole conceit, but similar to how I think people viewed the Seinfeld finale, the final step of said conceit veered a bit off for my enjoyment. This is a very meta book, where our main character (Asian Man) is both a person and a background character in a by-the-numbers police procedural, whose filming itself veers between scripted TV and improved real life(?). It’s satire and yet very grounded in […]

“You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away.”

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

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The Night Watch of the sprawling city of Ankh-Morpork consists of only three people (although people might question if Nobby Nobbs is entirely human) led by the depressed and shambolic Captain Samuel Vimes. No one is more surprised than he when he finds out that they have a new recruit from the mountains who actually volunteed for the Watch. No one ever does that. The fact that young Carrot Ironfunderson claims to be a dwarf, even though he’s 6 foot 2 and seems to keep […]

What are you hiding underneath that skin suit?

The Cockroach by Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan has his hits and misses, but by gum, everything he writes is memorable. It’s interesting to see him return to short fiction, since that’s where his career started. I don’t remember all the stories from , but I DO remember opening my mouth in shock a few times. He didn’t earn the nickname “Ian Macabre” for nothing. And with The Cockroach, we DEFINITELY get some wild and memorable moments. If you read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and thought “This, but in reverse,” you’ll be […]

Racism but with Rabbits

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

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The same way there are authors who are not for me, there are authors which are. Jasper Fforde is one of them. Authors in the former camp tend to have books that which I’d consider 4* which end up getting pushed down to 3* for me, while with Fforde I feel like the opposite is true. Which is not to say this is a 3* book that I have pushed up to 4*, just that I feel like there’s a bit of leeway he would […]

“The Spontaneous Anthropomorphic Event had taken place before I was born, so rabbits talking, wearing summer dresses or driving cars never seemed that unusual to me.”

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

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Say one thing for Jasper Fforde, he does what he wants. This is a quintessential 3.5 star book for me, but I was all set and ready to round this up to four stars until the ending happened and totally threw me for a loop. It’s not that I thought the ending was bad, more that I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t quite know how to process it. I may very well come back at some later date and round this up to four stars […]



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