Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Citizenship pending…

The Test by Sylvain Neuvel

by 1 Comment

I remember during the height of the COVID pandemic, my intrepid state developed a humble little app. Queenslanders were asked to “check in” when visiting cafes, shops and other venues. The idea was simple: if an infected person had been at the same place and time, contact tracers could notify you quickly and recommend testing. The trouble was that authorities tried to make its use mandatory. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories flourished. This wasn’t a harmless public health tool, some argued. It was tracking our movements, […]

No Kindness Too Soon

No Kindness Too soon by Sylvain Neuvel

by Leave a Comment

This is perhaps the weirdest and most shame-faced Cannonball I will ever write (I hope) but I read this back in March after hearing the author speak at ComicCon and mention the work, and I’m writing in June. As such, I can hardly remember anything about it. There’s no mention of this on the author’s Wikipedia, I had to check the Audible listing to make sure I had it right. I vaguely remember something about first contact with aliens, or rather, first sign that aliens […]

A battleship… Uh oh, sharks.

Gyo by Junji Ito

Uzumaki by Junji Ito

The Test by Sylvain Neuvel

The Hero by Lee Child

Classic Krakauer by Jon Krakauer

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

by Leave a Comment

Like a lot of you, I filled up on library books for the closures and hunkering down. My library announced that not only are they closing, that fines are waived, and nothing is due until the end of March, that also their dropboxes are closed. Who knows what that means, but for me it likely means I will read all the books I got, instead of sorting through and figuring it out one by one. Anyway, here’s my first chunk of reviews from all of […]

When you dedicate a book to Han Solo, odds are I’m going to like it.

by Leave a Comment

The CBR hivemind has been quite divided over Sleeping Giants, the first book in Sylvain Neuvel’s proposed trilogy (The Themis Files) about gigantic alien robots discovered on earth after being buried for thousands of years. I really enjoyed the interview/journal aspect of the storytelling and found the plot to be intriguing and fast-paced. I liked the confusion that the scientists were facing, and that there were people in Washington who had information, but weren’t all that willing to share it…unless Kung Pao chicken was involved. […]

Part X-Files and part World War Z? Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

by 2 Comments

My local bookstore is really great about making recommendations for books I may otherwise have never known about. (You may remember, this was how I discovered Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle.) There’s nothing better than popping by the store and checking out what’s new and which employees have left rave reviews for titles and authors I might enjoy. When I dropped by last Friday, I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular. But when I started to browse the SciFic/Fantasy section, I saw a book with a note […]

A Giant Woman Should Be More Exciting

by Leave a Comment

I picked up a free copy of this book at Worldcon last year.  I find free copies tend to be hit and miss, usually it’s a book that a publisher really wants to promote.  The last one I had read was Red Rising which was just awful, so I was a bit nervous about this one.  But the cover was very appealing.  I know they say you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, but who hasn’t picked up a book thinking it was going to […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo