My first ever Cannonball! I’m super proud of this, as I’ve been doing CBR for a few years (off and on) and have never managed more than a half-Cannonball before. I’m going to try to achieve this goal again next year. Now on to my final proper review of the year. Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a lovely, lovely book. It sits at the crossover between historical fiction and fantasy, but just barely steps over the line into the fantastical. It is […]
All that’s left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.
There’s a lot to admire in Drew Magary’s debut novel, The Postmortal. The plot is fascinating: what if, this year, scientists could discover the cure for aging? What if you could get a series of shots that would guarantee that you would never age a day — and would live for as long as you wanted, unless you died from a disease or an accident or an act of violence? Would you do it? If you did, what would it change about the way you […]
A love letter to video games
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was a more recent CBR9 book exchange gift. The backlash for the book was pretty intense, but with the recent film adaptation, I was curious to read it for myself. Thus, I was glad my Mocha Girls Read book club picked it for our white male author theme. I ended up finishing it over 4th of July and surprisingly enjoyed the pop culture filled story. The story follows Wade on an epic quest to essentially save the internet from a […]
Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
The Magic Barrel – 5/5 Stars This story collection came out in 1959 and contains the well known title story, but also has several other very good stories. It won the National Book Award as well. As I have previously stated in reviews, the age of the writer (here in a kind of debut effort) lends itself to an already mature and thoughtful work (this was also true for many of Raymond Chandler’s stories as well as the story collection A Lucky Man by Jamel […]