Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Breathing in a collection of sci-fi short stories by a master

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

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Exhalation: Stories is a collection of short sci-fi stories written by Ted Chiang. Below is a short review of each story but over-all, Exhalation: Stories made me think. Collectively, each story forced upon a small crisis of identity in how I relate to technology in my own world, and I am a more self-aware person for it. Chiang created a collection of stories that all meshes together. No story feels out of place or like an intruder. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”: An interesting and […]

“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (Bingo!)

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

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This is my first O’Connor, which seems strange as a Catholic raised in the American South (maybe if I had gone to a catholic school?) and it is both fascinating and darkly comic, which I don’t know that I was ready for. O’Connor is asking the reader what does it mean to be good? What does it mean to be moral? Those questions are the heart of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and then doubled down by making it the title piece of […]

Bingo #3 With a Banned Short Story

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

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In a bit of bingo logistics, I decided a couple short stories might be in order to fill in as many remaining squares as I could. With that in mind I went down the list of things I’ve been meaning to read anyway and came across “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson which has quite the history of making people question its place in front of readers at all. What I didn’t know was just how short it really is – its only 3,773 words long! […]

Miss Marple Solves It Again (and Again and Again)

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie

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Keeping up my summer tradition of an Agatha Christie re-read I picked up Miss Marple: the Complete Short Stories. Hercule Poirot has always been my favorite Christie sleuth – it must be the Virgo in me that loves his precise mode of detection. I like a few of the Miss Marple novels, but wasn’t as familiar with the short stories. What’s great about Christie is that her books, no matter how intricately plotted, are (like Stephen King’s) character-driven. So, even if you have read them before […]

“The mind has a mind of its own.” (CBR11 Bingo)

A Mind of Her Own by Paula McLain, Hillary Huber (narrator)

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This one was okay and therefore 2 stars. I don’t often rate books 1 or 2 stars, at this point in my Cannonball history my to read list is pretty well-honed in on books that I’m going to have a good response to (making them 3 stars or higher). But, back in the spring when I still had an Audible subscription this was one of their free Originals so I scooped it up. I’m not sad I chose it, I just wish it knew what […]

An Eden of dangerous things.

Florida by Lauren Groff

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I don’t generally read a lot of short story collections. When I do, I prefer the ones that have some kind of thread that tie them together. This book fit that particular bill. While each of the stories in this collection have something to do with the state of Florida, the thread that I found the most intriguing was parenthood. What does it mean to parent? How much of one’s identity is tied up in the role of parent? Is there a limit to what […]



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