RecurringExtra – Cannonball Read 17

I’m just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened

War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence by Ronan Farrow

February 24, 2019 by RecurringExtra Leave a Comment

I’m really only familiar with Ronan Farrow in his current incarnation as a reporter, so I was surprised to learn that journalism was actually his second career – before that, he worked in the State Department as part of the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The book is a dive into the State Department and America’s unsteady history of diplomacy. While the gutting of State under the Trump administration is of course part of the narrative, we look at how […]

The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.

Milkman by Anna Burns

February 9, 2019 by RecurringExtra Leave a Comment

It took me about 50 pages to get into this one – it’s obviously really well-written, but it’s so dense and recursive that it took me a while to find my way into the story. Set in Northern Ireland during what’s probably the 1970s, Milkman is a dense stream of consciousness from our main character, who is never named. Almost every character is unnamed, instead being referred to by their relationship to others (our narrator calls herself middle sister; her mother calls her daughter; her […]

the argument is, we are excluded from the argument

Tracker by Alexis Wright

January 31, 2019 by RecurringExtra Leave a Comment

Tracker Tilmouth was a member of the Stolen Generation – his older, lighter-skinned siblings were taken away from their parents and sent to white families in the south, while he and two younger brothers were taken away to a mission more than a thousand kilometres further north. Tracker’s ties to both northern and central Aboriginal communities stayed with him his whole life, and were one of these reasons he became such an influential figure in the struggle for Aboriginal civil rights. Tracker’s life story would […]

as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

January 23, 2019 by RecurringExtra 1 Comment

The problem with my local library is I go in for one book and then see ten others I’ve been intending to read, and then they let me have them for free. And so I finally got around to reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The actual plot is pretty well known, and it turns out I could have summarised it before reading the novel itself: Orlando is an Elizabethan nobleman who suffers disappointments as both a lover and a writer. He leaves England for […]

would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack open each other’s skulls?

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

January 18, 2019 by RecurringExtra 1 Comment

As the US government shut down drags on, I figured it was time to learn more about the threat the Trump presidency poses to the day-to-day running of America. Turns out that, like basically every political story from anywhere in the world at the moment, it’s significantly worse than I thought. Michael Lewis books are almost their own specific little sub-genre now – relatively light and readable looks at deeply boring topics. The Fifth Risk has less of an overarching narrative than previous works […]

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First Watch by Dale Lucas

January 11, 2019 by RecurringExtra 3 Comments

First Watch is a buddy cop movie in a high fantasy setting, where our two comically mismatched partners (a wet-behind-the-ears human and a grizzled veteran dwarf) have to find a way to get along and solve an increasingly complicated mystery in an early-modern city riven by factionalism and peopled by elves, orcs, mages, humans and dwarves. The premise would have sold me on this book immediately… if it was 1988 and Guards! Guards! By Sir Terry Pratchett didn’t exist. Unfortunately for Dale Lucas, Pratchett’s […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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