Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.”

Wool by Hugh Howey

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I know it’s only January 20th so this is a bold claim, but Wool is going to be on my top 10 list of books I read in 2024. This novel started as a standalone short story “Holston,” but upon its publication and soaring popularity, Howey wrote four more stories that have now been bound together in this first volume. And it gripped me from page one through the very end. This is exactly the kind of book that I love to read in winter, […]

I was hoping for another Wool. This wasn’t what I was hoping for.

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Remember back in CBR5 when we all read Wool and Shift and Dust (also known as the Shift Omnibus) and we all loved them and couldn’t stop talking about Hugh Howey? That trilogy was smart and exciting and we were all fired up about this new name in dystopian sci-fi. A guy who had self-published and made a success out of himself. The story was inspiring and the books were great. We even did a book discussion over on Pajiba, and I truly thought we would be hearing a lot more […]

The Way Out

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It’s been a long time since I was so thoroughly sucked into a fictional universe as I was with Wool. Honestly, that’s what I miss about fantasy, historical fiction and sci-fi books — while the writing may be good, it is rare that I would feel totally enfolded into the history, the context and the world that an author creates. I think the last time that happened was with the first book of the Chaos Trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go. Hugh Howey does this for […]

I bet Silo workers keep their hats in the Caps Lock

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[Second Novel In A Series Alert!  Review of the first book is here] Sequels are exceptionally tricky affairs to balance.  If you stray too far afield from what came before, then you risk alienating the audience you built with the original.  If you hew too closely, then you’re bringing nothing new to the table.  But as difficult as following up a story can be, fleshing out what came before is an even more difficult tightrope to walk.  In order to write a proper prequel, you […]

A Well Spun Yarn

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Wool is one of those futuristic, dystopian, post-apocolytpic, insert your own buzzword here, type books that I’m sure is packaged as a three-book series…(checking internets)…yep, it’s called the Silo Series and also includes the novels Shift and Dust. Despite my sarcasm, this was a book I couldn’t set down many times. The novel started as a short story that was released by Amazon for the Kindle in 2011. Due to its popularity, Howey continued writing and amassed a three book collection in two years. Basically […]



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