Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Not for me.

The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang

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This one keeps souring in my mind the longer I’m away from it. The problem here is that I do not find stories about flighty people escaping from their responsibilities and the people counting on them–whether or not it was “their fault”–inherently interesting. In fact, I kind of hate them. Maybe other people get more kicks out of exploring their shitty unconnected left behind relationships with parental figures, but I find the whole thing unpleasant and not rewarding in any way. The one thing I […]

There’s a universe where I can still eat gluten and dairy. I find this comforting.

Self-Portrait With Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka

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I’m so glad I picked this little book up against my normal inclinations. The cover makes it look like serious lit-fic, but it absolutely isn’t. This is a light sci-fi/speculative book about a woman named Pepper who was adopted as a baby but whose biological mother, Ula Frost, is a famous reclusive portraitist who is said to be able to pull her clients’ doppelgängers out of her paintings from alternate universes. When Ula seemingly disappears, Pepper is contacted by lawyers and made executor of her […]

Nah.

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

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What it comes down to is that I found this book extremely unpleasant. And also dull. And reading it made me feel like I would rather be banging my head against something very solid. This was made even more frustrating by glimmers of stuff I probably would have found very intriguing in another author’s hands, or in another type of story altogether. The Cloisters is about a woman whose name I have long forgotten who is heading to her first post-graduate job, supposedly at the […]

Not for me, alas.

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

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This wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much better. I think I just really don’t gel with this author. I read a short story from her that one year I voted for the Hugos and it turned me off so hard from her stuff. She seemed like the kind of author who was more interested in being artsy and impressive than in telling a good story. Those kinds of authors and I usually butt heads. So when this book was chosen for December’s […]

“The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

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This is a book I wouldn’t have picked up if not for one of my book clubs, and this is exactly why book clubs and stuff that makes you read outside your comfort zone are so fun. This book was so good! A real treat for book-lovers, and for humans who lived through (are living through?) the COVID-19 pandemic. I didn’t get excited about this one until somebody told me it was about a woman who is haunted by her least favorite bookshop customer, who […]

Twitter Win Fizzles

This is How You Lost the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

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Twitter was kind of saved from doom recently by a guy loudly and proudly promoting his favorite new book, and encouraging others to do the same. I approve of this behavior. I was with Bigolas Dickolas (a Monty Python reference, I hope) in his enthusiasm for about the first half of This is How You Lose the Time War, but then it lost me. The problem for me is that there is not enough world and character building to hold interest and keep the story […]



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