Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Two nerdy characters and a make-over fake dating plot – in a Regency romance

My Fake Rake by Eva Leigh

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Official book description: Lady Grace Wyatt is content as a wallflower, focusing on scientific pursuits rather than the complications of society matches. But when a handsome, celebrated naturalist returns from abroad, Grace wishes, for once, to be noticed. Her solution: to “build” the perfect man, who will court her publicly and help her catch his eye. Grace’s colleague, anthropologist Sebastian Holloway, is just the blank slate she requires. In exchange for funding his passage on an expedition leaving London in a few months, Sebastian allows […]

The Munroe Doctrine

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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When I was in grad school, most of my professors used xkcd comics at some point.  I’m pretty sure I understand p-values because of this strip. My friend told me about a book by “that stick figure comic guy from class” so I checked it out. That was What If? by Randall Munroe. What If? is a book that provides real scientific and mathematic answers to absolutely absurd, but fun questions.  Questions like: How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the […]

Random and Clever

How To by Randall Munroe

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Best for: People who like science and humor. In a nutshell: Author Munroe takes on everyday problems like ‘How to Move’ with increasingly absurd advice like ‘get a bunch of helicopters to do that’, and then explains the science behind it. Worth quoting: When discussing using trained birds of prey to knock drones out of the sky: “…but any plan that calls for countering rogue machines by training animals to hurl themselves at them is probably a bad one. We wouldn’t enforce speed limits by […]

This is (almost) the end

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

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Mary Roach’s Stiff is a paean to dead bodies. She notes in the introduction that “Cadavers are our superheroes: They brave fire without flinching, withstand falls from head-on car crashes into walls. You can fire a gun at them or run a speedboat over their legs, and it will not faze them. Their heads can be removed with no deleterious effect. They can be in six places at once. . . .  What a shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the […]

Red Rover Red Rover roll right over Mars

Red Rover: Curiosity on Mars by Richard Ho

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Red Rover: Curiosity on Mars by Richard Ho, is one of those books that is cool. Yet I still feel lackluster about it. There was something missing. Katherine Roy’s illustrations are a combination of realistic and a hint of whimsy. The text itself, however, has a more artistic then “serious” scientific element, but still has all the information needed. As we explore the planet of Mars, we learn about the planet and the machines that came before Curiosity. This information will grab the space nut but […]

A wonderful surprise-an intelligent, articulate science graphic novel

The Dialogues by Clifford V. Johnson

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I attend a science fiction/fantasy convention every year and during one of the panels on the Physics of the Avengers this past year, the speaker recommended this graphic novel, which was written by a friend of his. Hard science explanations in a graphic novel format intrigued me, but I was unsure if it would actually work over the entire work. While it drags in some places, I really enjoyed this graphic novel. There isn’t a coherent story, but rather the author chooses to use the […]



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