Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

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, […]

An Unexpected Delight

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

by Leave a Comment

I am going the confess here that I have been dragging my feet a little bit when it came to writing this review for this book. Light From Uncommon Stars was actually the first of the Hugo Best Novel Nominees that I read when the voting packet was first made available, and if I didn’t scrunch up and focus on my resolve this afternoon, it would have been the last one I wrote about.  This is one of the most unusual speculative fiction books I […]

Dark and Light and Lots of Greys

Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas

by Leave a Comment

In this collection, Thomas presents fourteen short works of speculative fiction which blend science fiction, fantasy, and horror together in intriguing ways. It’s hard to write this review because of the diversity of the tales. The stories touch upon a plethora of genres and themes, including familial relationships, transformation, and atonement. A common device the author uses is cyclical time loops, which often lends a dream-like quality to the story that is enhanced by his deft prose. One thing I really liked about the collection […]

If the formula works, might as well use it

Jujutsu Kaisen, vols. 0-12 by Gege Akutami

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been seeing comments about the anime for Jujustsu Kaisen is the best thing ever this year, so when I saw almost the first 12 books in the manga series at the library, I decided to try it out. As it turns out the whole thing is relatively formulaic (enough that missing volumes 3, 4, and 11 didn’t seem to matter a whole lot) but still has enough personality to be interesting. The basic gist is that Yuji Itadori who has just lost his grandfather […]

Structure over substance

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

by Leave a Comment

I’m going to be really honest with y’all. I picked this book up for cover and description of hte structure alone. But I mean, come on. That’s an intriguing and beautiful cover. And as for the structure: this novel is told in two books. Book 1 is read like a normal book, from the front to about halfway through. To read Book 2, the reader has to turn the book over to the back and read from the back cover as if it’s the front. […]

“The best worldbuilding doesn’t show the seams.”

Finder: Chase the Lady by Carla Speed McNeil

by Leave a Comment

Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder series is one of those series where I bring it up to people and they stare at me blankly. It is one of the best pieces of near-future alternate universe science fiction worldbuilding and storytelling out there and it feels like a precious secret, which is frustrating considering how amazing these books are, and how long they’ve been coming out (26 years). It feels like these should be as critically well-regarded as Bone, which came out around the same time and is similarly […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo