Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About Caesar's Wife

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G'day, I'm an Australian Cannonballer! I'm a horror/thriller junkie embarking on my eighth Half-Cannonball. I'm a bit shy at commenting, but I absolutely love writing and reading reviews. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Caesar’s Wife's Quick Questions interview.)

Caesar's Wife's Reviews:

Burn baby burn

Quarterly Essay 99: Woodside v The People by Marian Wilkinson

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This is my final book review for 2025, and it feels fitting to end the year with Quarterly Essay 99: Woodside vs the People by Marian Wilkinson. In this expansive and meticulously researched essay, Wilkinson traces the history of Woodside Energy, Australia’s dominant liquefied natural gas (LNG) producer, and its outsized influence on the nation’s energy landscape. Wilkinson interrogates the company’s leadership culture, its carefully cultivated proximity to political power, and the way these relationships have insulated Woodside from meaningful accountability. Most powerfully, she examines […]

The Importance of Being Earnest

Quarterly Essay No. 100 – The Good Fight by Sean Kelly

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The Good Fight examines Anthony Albanese’s Labor government as it moves through its second term. Kelly argues that the Prime Minister has built his leadership style, and the modern Labor movement more broadly, around kindness, collaboration, and a soft-spoken civility. These qualities have distinguished him from his predecessors and resonated with voters who were weary of political combat. But Kelly questions whether this gentler approach has blunted Labor’s sense of purpose. His central claim is that Albanese’s government suffers from a lack of belief: it […]

The Anti-Hustle

Ikigai: the Japanese secret to a long and happy life by Hector Garcia and Francis Miralles

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2025 was not the year I expected it to be. I began the year in a brand-new job; an entirely new role that felt well aligned with my values, my career, and where I thought my life was heading. I ended the year not only out of that job, but in a completely different organisation. The work is still aligned, but it is not at all what I imagined myself doing. I had expected to be in that role for at least five years: setting […]

Shine on, Sister

What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

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What Does It Feel Like? is Sophie Kinsella’s swan song: her deeply personal reckoning with a terminal stage-4 glioblastoma diagnosis, which tragically took her life recently. I grew up inhaling the Shopaholic series – stories about a woman who believed the right blue silk scarf could change everything. On the surface, those books are light and effervescent, but beneath them runs a thread of genuine terror that anyone who has ever let a credit card spiral out of control will recognise. Kinsella wrote flawed but […]

Steeped in Meaning

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

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I had the pleasure of reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which turned out to be the perfect end-of-your-day read: light but meaningful, engaging without being taxing. The story follows Dex, a monk in a futuristic society that has rebalanced itself after the AI singularity. In this imagined future, robots gain consciousness and – rather than triggering a bloody, Terminator-style war – humans and robots amicably agree to go their separate ways. Decades pass without contact as robot territory becomes the Wild, […]

Resisting all my instincts to make an inappropriate puberty pun…

Secret Boys’ Business (2nd Edition) by Rose Stewart, Fay Angelo & Heather Anderson

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I have an 8-year-old son, and it’s starting to become apparent that we need to have some conversations about the facts of life — birds and bees, bodies, changes, all of it. I wanted a resource that would help us start those conversations in a way that felt natural, factual, and not at all awkward. Secret Boys’ Business (2nd edition) turned out to be exactly that. This book is an extremely accessible, easy-to-digest overview of pretty much any question a pre-pubescent boy might have about […]



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