Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Nah.

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

by 3 Comments

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by 5 Comments

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 […]

Come for Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, stay for PAN (Practical Automaton Number One).

My Imaginary Mary (Mary, #2) by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows

by Leave a Comment

Still not as good as the first Lady Janie book. A lot of this made no sense, and anachronisms were flying around willy-nilly, but I had a good time. My Imaginary Mary is what you get when you mix light fantasy (there are fairies! and Mary Godwin (Shelley) is one! (different kind of fairy than you’d expect)), alternate history (what if Mary met Ada Lovelace?), and a truly ridiculous sensibility (they invent the name Peter Pan for some reason?) with egregious unconcern for historical accuracy. […]

Wow, what a bummer.

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

by Leave a Comment

It’s actually pretty impressive how this book could take super interesting subject matter and make it this dull. This book did absolutely nothing for me, except make me wish it was over. I can’t entirely pinpoint why, so I’m chalking it up to disliking the style it was written in, but there were also some baked-in flaws that could have made it better for me. This is a dual-timeline story, one in 1628 following a young Dutch girl whose mother has just died, who is […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo