Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

This book took me ten months to finish (double bingo)

Monstress, vol 1: The Awakening by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda

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CBR14 Bingo: Monster (there are several monsters in this story, both humanoid and not) Official book description: Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900’s Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steampunk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers. So total honesty here. […]

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

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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 […]

Give This The Miniseries Treatment!

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

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I was pretty excited to finally pick up and find the time to read A Master of Djinn. I had previously been delighted by P. Djèlí Clark’s alternative, magical steampunk 1910s Cairo. The setting is just so damned fun. The novellas I had read before Master of Djinn—The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and A Dead Djinn in Cairo— were masterful in how they managed to be so descriptive for short form works, so was I curious as to how he would adapt an entire novel into this […]

“The three of them sat there – a Ministry agent, a half-djinn, and a cat (likely), staring out past the balcony to the sleeping city they somehow had to find a way to save.”

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

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CBR14 Bingo: “Snake” – A character lies to a partner for fear of reprisal.  The same charac ter under goes physical transformation due to heritage and the gifts of a goddess, which includes healing. An alternate 1912 Cairo with lady investigators and magic?  Yes, please!  40 years previous magic was reintroduced to the world and djinn were released by the magician, al’Jahiz.  After a fraught time, djinn were integrated into Egyptian society.  They have since used their abilities to bring wonderous, magical and mechanical inventions […]

Cairo, 1912, with magic. Sign me up.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

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CBR 14 BINGO: Rec’d. MsWas recommended this one to me, and I will be recommending it to others. I also saw this recommended on NPR’s list of best sci-fi and fantasy books of the last decade. In 1912 Cairo, collector of antiquities, lover of the exotic, and all around British-colonial caricature Lord Worthington meets with his Brotherhood of al-Jahiz, a group whose noble purpose is to “recover the most sacred wisdom of the ancients, to create a greater tomorrow.” Worthington’s group has taken to collecting […]

Have I moved on emotionally from Gail Carriger?

Prudence (The Custard Protocol, #1) by Gail Carriger

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This was a perfectly fine and entertaining book that I for some reason had a hard time picking up and making myself finish, and I feel almost no pull to continue and finish the series. This is such a huge turnaround for what my feelings were about her first series, The Parasol Protectorate, which featured the main character of this book’s mother. I was enchanted and delighted by those books. Our main character here is Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama, and I’m not even going to […]



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