Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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 […]

“Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

Turtles All The Way Down by John Green

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Plot: Aza is stuck inside her mind, and it is not friendly territory. Why would it be, if she, like the rest of us, are mere receptacles for billions of bacteria to propagate. She is not a person, she is a country or a planet. A non-sentient thing moving through the world with her movements and thoughts and actions compelled in some way by the bacteria or some other thing, but never her own. That’s hard enough as it is, but is made all the […]

“People get too caught up in how things look instead of how things feel”

Lovelight Farms by B K Borison

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An unexpectedly lovely holiday romance. I didn’t know they made those. Plot: Stella grew up without being able to set down roots. She and her mom moved around a lot, and among other issues, had very limited funds. But every year, her mom would find a Christmas tree farm that let people come in for free, and they’d spend some time taking in some holiday magic. She wanted that magic, and to share it with others. And more than anything, she wanted to set down […]

“Your only chance is to grab hold of happiness when you have it, and enjoy it for as long as it lasts.”

Goodnight from London by Jennifer Robson

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Plot: An ambitious young journalist with a secret makes her way across the Atlantic to what she hopes is her big break – reporting on the domestic (i.e. women’s) angle of the growing war in Europe in the summer of 1940.  Her journey takes us on an intimate journey of the war, from the basic ways in which meals were affected by rations to the massive toll of civilian losses during the Blitz to the war zones in France and back. Through it all, Ruby […]

“I’m a work in progress.”

When Javi Dumped Mari by Mia Sosa

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Something of a blend of When Harry Met Sally and My Best Friend’s Wedding.  Plot: Javi and Mari have been best friends since university. Mari is the DEI hater’s wet dream. She’s what I imagine AOC would have been like in university. Fierce, intelligent, and intensely intimidating. She is too much for pretty much everyone and she deals with it by never really giving her whole heart to anyone. So when Javi meets her and catches feelings, he decides never to venture down that path. She is too […]

“You need to define who you are. Otherwise, people will happily do it for you.”

Yinka, Where Is Your Husband by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

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Plot: Yinka is a highly educated, successful businesswoman with a life and friends and a family intensely fixated on her lack of marital prospects. On the wrong side of thirty, Yinka decides it’s time to take the bull by the horns, and really commit to resolving that outstanding issue. The fact that she’s just been laid off after having sort of lied to her mother about her having gotten promoted, and the fact that she didn’t actually like her job or trust her friends has […]



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