Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: Speculative Fiction

Catnip For People Who Love the End of the World

Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan

by 2 Comments

I’m drawn to climate catastrophe and dystopian novels the same way some people are drawn to horror or crime stories: seeing fictional representations of my worst fears are somehow calming to me. Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan was compared to Station Eleven and Severence on its Goodread page, so I put it in my library queue figuring it would basically be like catnip for me.  Walk the Vanished Earth is difficult to describe, because it encompasses so much: seven generations, two planets, 200 […]

Let Down…But Not Disappointed?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

by 2 Comments

Have you ever read a book that was super hyped and thought it was…good but not as good as advertised? And you weren’t disappointed you read it but it still didn’t match the exaltations from others? Cloud Atlas is such a book for me. I appreciated what it was trying to do; I definitely got the 2666 vibes and 2666 is one of my favorite books of all-time so that’s a good thing. I like how it looked at the scope of history and the human experience. I like the […]

October 2022 Leftovers

Batman: The Impostor by Mattson Tomlin

The Son by Jo Nesbø

Killer Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury

The Devil's Wedding Ring by Vidar Sundstøl

by Leave a Comment

Happy belated Halloween to all who observe! Again, I don’t have as many leftovers as I did in recent months since I’m logging so many full reviews for the Book Bingo. But here’s what I got, all of them quality 4-star reads…   Batman: The Impostor Really enjoyed this one. A fresh take, helped by the fact that Batman is surrounded by characters with no history. Jim Gordon is off the force. Alfred has forsaken him (or vice versa). No Joker, no Riddler, Penguin functions […]

A Visit With An Old Friend You’ve Outgrown a Little

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

by Leave a Comment

CBR14Bingo: Bodies (dead bodies, aliens inhabiting human bodies, people going from cyberspace into a body for the first time, etc.) I was obsessed with Neil Gaiman’s work from high school through college and then burned out and haven’t read anything by him in probably 10 years, so when I saw this in the bookstore I initially didn’t think I was going to get it. But when I picked it up and started reading the first story, I remembered that I liked that one, and it […]

Franz Kafka got together with Charles Dickens and wrote an episode of the X-Files based on Little Shop of Horrors

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

by 1 Comment

CBR BINGO 14: Funky: Where Steampunk meets your nightmares “The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.” Those two sentences, from the second paragraph of Chapter 1 of Period Street Station, captivated me: the delicious smells of a bustling market intermingling with the filth […]

Grief and Hope – the human experience

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

by Leave a Comment

BINGO – New This is going to be a difficult book to summarize because I would not consider it a novel. It’s closer to a collection of short stories, but that’s not quite right either. It’s something in between. There’s a long form improv format in which the audience sees a scene with Person A and Person B. Something in that scene sparks an idea for a scene tangentially connected between Person B and Person C. Then a connected scene between Person C and D, […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo