Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About kniki

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'Once a reader, always a reader' Hi! I'm from Australia!

kniki's Reviews:

A journey across freezing Canada in the 1800s

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

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Set in 1867, Canada, this book revolves around workers and their families in a fur trapping company. In a small town where everyone knows everyone else and everything that happens, a man is brutally murdered. Yet no one saw anything. Then a 17 year old boy goes missing, and his mother sets off cross country to find him… With a pace as slow as a middle aged housewife trudging through snow covered and wind swept countryside in a dozen petticoats, the story follows several characters […]

Turns out, she’s still a genius

Turns out, I'm fine by Judith Lucy

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Last year, Judith Lucy was overwhelmed and dying (according to the name of her podcast) but in 2021 it turns out, she’s fine. Which I am supremely happy to hear, because she’s been one of my favourite comedians since the 90s, not long after she first hit Australia’s scene. This is Lucy’s memoir of a pretty shitty series of life events that she wrangles, as always, into great material. With this book however she goes a bit further in trying sort out life’s shit and […]

Inside Yawn-More

Inside Broadmoor by Jonathan Levi and Emma French

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As mentioned in my previous review, I am one of those people who is somewhat ashamedly addicted to true crime – not just podcasts but also tv series, documentaries and books. Which is why I picked up Inside Broadmoor: Up close and personal with Britain’s most dangerous criminals. Disappointingly, there wasn’t really anything ‘up close and personal’ about this book; it’s more of a broad overview of Broadmoor’s history, location, staff, patients and scandals. ‘For over 150 years, it has contained the UK’s most violent, […]

When enough is enough – you can’t keep it on the inside anymore.

Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee

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I hadn’t heard of the ‘eggshell skull’ principle before – it’s a legal doctrine that says a defendant must ‘take their victim as they find them’. For example if you swing a punch at someone and they die because they have a thin skull, you can’t use that to excuse ‘just a punch’. In the case of Bri Lee, a once defenseless victim becomes a strong accuser who knows the system and is determined to navigate a path to justice. This memoir begins as the […]

Great book; awful characters

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

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This novel, winner of a few ‘best book’ prizes in 2009, is a contemporaneous picture of middle class suburban Australia, full of desperately unlike-able characters. I was impressed at how the author managed to make me feel at once completely at home with the setting and the average-ness of the characters’ lives while at the same time feeling lucky that I wasn’t related to or friends with anyone remotely like any of them. Despite the awful characters, or maybe because of them, I actually really […]

A history of Australia that’s far from dry

Intoxicating: Ten drinks that shaped Australia by Max Allen

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There is a widespread myth that Australia’s Indigenous peoples were introduced to alcohol by European settlers, and were susceptible to drinking a lot of it because they’d never had it before. The first chapter of this fascinating book blows that myth away with descriptions of fermented gum tree sap and how it had been used long before the arrival of rum and wine. This is both a really good book about alcoholic drinks and about history. The author, a journalist and wine writer, goes to […]



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