Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Australian spookiness. Just add panpipes and a didgeridoo.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

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  In 1975, I saw an Australian movie, Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of the most perfect and perfectly weird films I have ever seen.  The impact of this film still resonates with me, and when I was looking for another book at Powells, and noticed this, I HAD to have it.  I had no idea the film was based on a book, and yet here we are.  And it is every bit as freakily good as the movie as.   It begins as a […]

“A man without rights in this world is not freed from his responsibilities.”

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga

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My mom is an unrepentant fast-forwarder. Any movie montage, car chase, fight scene, or any extended section of a movie with no dialogue is gonna get fast-forwarded through. (I grew up thinking this was totally normal and acceptable, and have had several boyfriends go “WAIT, what are you DOING?!?!” when I started fast-forwarding through a scene I thought was skippable.) This book, while totally lovely, could definitely have used a fast-forward button. Danny (Dhananjaya) is from Sri Lanka, living illegally in Australia. He came on […]

Because language has suffered enough…

Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language by Don Watson

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When I first read the example ‘The competition policy reforms further improve the performance of government business enterprises through a program of regulation review, enhanced prices oversight, application of competitive neutrality principles and procedures for structural reform of public monopolies,’ on p65 of Death Sentence, I didn’t quite get the author’s point. I mean, I understood what it meant. But the next example of language spelled out exactly why a person like me needed to read this book. ‘Language is a key issue of access […]

We built BrisVegas on rock and roll

Pig City by Andrew Stafford

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  Pig City chronicles a brief yet transformative period of Brisbane life, from the 70s through to the 90s, but this is no ordinary history book. The story is told mainly through the lens of music and politics and shows how the two influenced each other in a time when Brisbane was still coming of age.  The ‘BrisVegas’ tag jokingly likens the country town where there’s not much to do (as Brisbane was up until the late eighties) with Las Vegas. Beginning in the seventies, the […]

Nonetheless, I still want to be a lighthouse keeper

The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

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I read Ahab’s Wife at an impressionable age and it filled me with a deep hatred of whales (unfair to them, I know) and a fierce desire to be a lighthouse keeper. Despite many things keeping me from a serious pursuit of such an endeavor (I keep moving further and further away from the ocean, the aforementioned hatred of whales, my reliance on the internet…) I will always jump at the chance to read something lighthouse adjacent. The Light Between Oceans starts off strong- a quiet and […]



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