Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Join Our Spoiler-Welcome Discussion of T. Kingfisher’s Books  

A Matter of “Pure Will”?

Voss by Patrick White

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I have an embarrassing confession to make: I have never read anything written by Patrick White. It’s odd, and somewhat disappointing really, that our only Australian-born Nobel Laureate for literature is so frequently passed over. For example, I never heard his name brought up once when I was studying English. He doesn’t seem to have much of a profile outside of Australia either. (Unlike say, Gerald Murnane, who seems to be slightly more recognized here in the US than at home.) So, I made the […]

An Adults Only Lord of the Flies

Batavia by Peter FitzSimons

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The Batavia, the pride of the Dutch East India Company, is on its maiden voyage from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies when it wrecks off just off the coast of western Australia. But the tragedy of the Batavia stems not from the forces of nature, but from the evil in men’s hearts. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about this story in the last couple years, and was so curious about this strange, dark story, part survival story and part true crime, that I decided […]

As Slippery as a Fish

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan

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“Billy Gould could not escape the growing suspicion that he had become entrapped in a book, a character whose future as much as his past was already written, determined, foretold, as unalterable as it was intolerable. What choice did he have but to destroy that book?”   I’ve saved the most flummoxing book of the year for the last square on the bingo board: a book which involves metafiction and magical realism in convict-era Tasmania. Thanks, Richard Flanagan. Gould’s Book of Fish has a convoluted […]

You are all Dead Spirits

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People by Darren Rix; Craig Cormick

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So as a school kid in Australia back in the nineties, I remember being taught, like many of my peers, the Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? To add all the qualifiers, Cook and his crew are probably best described as the first set of Europeans to visit the east coast of Australia …after the dutch sort of poked around in the west.  But very little discussion time was given to the people that had lived in Australia for tens […]

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]

Suffers from classic sophomore novel syndrome

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

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Weyward was one of my favorite reads last year so I was excited when I saw that Emilia Hart had a new novel releasing this year. It’s always hard, though, to follow up a hugely successful novel because of the expectations it creates. I know it’s about the journey, not the destination, and as someone that reads a lot, I can often foresee where certain plot points might go. In fact, I think Emilia Hart expects that her readers see exactly how some things are […]



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