Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Evil AIs are in my wheelhouse

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

by 3 Comments

I picked this up purely based on the renewed buzz it was getting in one of my book circles. It was available as a library audio download, so why not? I went into it knowing basically nothing about it except what the cover looked like. I was honestly expecting a mystery book since it seemed like a case file. And I guess it really is a case file, just not the kind I was anticipating. In reality, it’s part evil AI sci fi and part […]

Just as outstanding as the first book, now I need to seek out The Lady Astronaut short stories

The Fated Sky: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal

by 2 Comments

Fun fact, Robinette is not part of her last name and while it sits in the middle of her name it isn’t technically a middle name either.  She is Mary Robinette, and that is how she prefers to be called.  Both Mary and Robinette are in honor of her grandmothers.  It is not uncommon to find her books misshelved due to this misunderstanding.   The Fated Sky is the second book in the Lady Astronaut duolgy that started with The Calculating Stars.  The alternate timeline Kowal created has […]

“Nothing … was private: only secret, only silent. We ate our tears.”

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

by 1 Comment

  This book is so wildly out of my wheelhouse that I don’t really feel qualified to assess it. I’ve almost never read science fiction and rarely read short story collections, and I’m sure I’ve never read a book that was both. There were some stories I loved and some I hated (luckily, the longer novella at the end hit a solid “liked a lot” on that scale), but without a doubt I now have tremendous respect for Le Guin as a writer. It’s astonishing […]

And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

by Leave a Comment

The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Get lured in by the world-building, stay for the intersectional dissection of oppression

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

by Leave a Comment

“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?” Most people don’t deeply question (cough, Kanye, cough) why enslaved people “allowed” themselves to remain enslaved. But most of us also don’t dwell deeply on what systematic physical and psychological trauma would be needed to keep a whole class of people oppressed and how that trauma may ripple out generationally. And why would we? Envisioning something like that is […]

“… these are the differences that determine the fate of the universe.”

Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson

by 2 Comments

In the year 2213, Earth no longer exists. Mysteriously, the sun began expanding in size, approaching supernova phase far far earlier than it should.  Humanity was prepared, having developed the plans and ability to colonize Mars briefly, before regrouping on a distant star with Earth-like qualities. By now, most humans have begun the 150 year journey to this new star, and a select few remain behind on Mars to finish terraforming and collect data to ensure the trip to our new home goes smoothly.  Liam […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo