Arena by Holly Jennings My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Arena” is set in a future Los Angeles in which virtual gaming has overtaken live (real?) sports as the main attraction. This new virtual gaming takes VR to a new reality. The players have to actually workout and train because the sensors that take them to the virtual world carry over the players’ actual abilities. If you sprain your ankle in the real world, it’s still going to be weak in the virtual. There’s also […]
What Happens When We Finally Colonize Mars
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury was originally written as separate short stories. After being submitted to his publisher, the publisher told Bradbury to connect the short stories into a cohesive collection about the planet Mars and its subsequent colonization of the planet. Each year I teach “There Will Come Soft Rain” by Bradbury and until reading “The Martian Chronicles” I had no idea the two were related. Granted, the inclusion of “Soft […]
“There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.” (CBR10Bingo Blackout!)
I apologize now, this review will not really be a review. It is more a love letter to our community here at Cannonball Read. Of the ten books we had to choose from for So Popular, I had read most, but not all. The ones I haven’t read I don’t care to (looking at you, Divergent) so I was thinking about re-reading Eleanor & Park to go with last year’s re-read of Attachments or maybe The Martian to see if I still had a book […]
Just as good as the first, maybe better?
I was not disappointed by this sequel. P.S. writing this on my phone. I don’t actually have much to say about the book. I enjoyed it a lot, and I was worried that I would have forgotten everything that happened in the last book, and I sort of had, but Scalzi makes it easy for you to catch up. Cardenia is still emperox, Kiva is still a profane little firecracker, Marse is traveling around giving lectures about the flow collapse, and the effing Nohamapetans are […]



