Cannonball Read 17

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 seventh 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:

Mindless Creator

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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I feel as though, following my reading of Frankenstein, I need to do some kind of deep analysis of its themes and subtext. There is so much just beneath the surface that needs further research and thought. Alas, I don’t really have time for a self-imposed literature assignment, so I’ll just stick with a book review and a few random thoughts and observations for now. Frankenstein is the tale of a man whose thirst for knowledge and invention is his ultimate undoing – a ‘modern’ […]

A Tolentino Gateway Drug

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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My boss bought me Trick Mirror, a collection of nine essays by The New Yorker, Jezebel, and The Hairpin writer Jia Tolentino, for my birthday this year. As usual, she’s gifted me something meaty to absorb that suits my tastes well. The collection of essays in Trick Mirror includes a range of topics spanning marriage, the 2016 election and Trump presidency, life as a teen reality tv ‘star’, Big Tech, and religion. But it’s not just a bunch of millennial naval-gazing reflection. This is a well-researched, sourced, […]

So it goes.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

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Slaughterhouse Five was not the novel I expected. Based on nothing but the vaguest notion of the plot, which I formed solely on the title, I pictured a gritty, war-torn, 1984-ish tale of hopelessness and carnage. Instead, I was swept along with the funny, bizarre, and moving life of Billy Pilgrim – a survivor of the Firebombing of Dresden from World War II. He was a prisoner of war, an optometrist, a husband and father, a time-traveller, an alien abductee, a motivational speaker, a murder […]

A Worthwhile Second Chance

I Give My Marriage A Year by Holly Wainwright

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I read and reviewed Holly Wainwright’s debut novel, The Mummy Bloggers, last year and despised it with a fiery passion. It was frothy, stereotypical, anti-feminist crap and I loathed every character and every page.  So, you can imagine my trepidation returning to the Wainwright waters for her third novel! (Her second, How To Be Perfect, was a sequel to The Mummy Bloggers so I figured I’d spare myself the rage migraines and skip it…) Before I get into the book review, a little background on […]

A quiet tragedy

On The Beach by Nevil Shute

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On The Beach was Shute’s most celebrated novel, published in 1957 when nuclear annihilation was still a somewhat novel and nebulous threat, rather than its own pop-culture genre. The novel takes place mostly in Melbourne, Australia, as a cloud of nuclear ‘dust’ descends from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The dust originated from over 4,000 nuclear detonations, set off in a brief but cataclysmic war between most of the world’s major and minor powers. The USA, Russia, and China are all named, but it […]

Almost right, but not quite…

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

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Axiom’s End is the debut novel of one of my favourite YouTube video essayists, Lindsay Ellis. Ellis is known for her retrospective analyses of classic Disney movies, her undying passion for Phantom of the Opera, and her obsession with dissecting the Transformers movies. She’s full of quips, insights, and feminist musings. I am a big fan of hers. But, as with Roxanne Gay’s ‘Bad Feminist’, my love of the author did not translate to love of the book. Axiom’s End, taking place in the year […]



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