Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Word ‘Turbulent’ Is Bearing a Lot of Weight Here

Bomb Season in Jakarta: A personal account of a turbulent period in Australian diplomacy by Grant Dooley

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This is yet another book I’ve discovered via listening to ABC’s Conversations.  The subtitle of Bomb Season in Jakarta is A personal account of a turbulent period in Australian diplomacy, and Grant Dooley is not kidding when he writes this. Back in 2004, Dooley and his family had moved to Indonesia to start a three year stint working at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. This was a few years after the 1999 East Timorese crisis and only two years after the 2002 Bali Bombings, Indonesia’s […]

“Fellas, let’s go” Well, not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech, was it?

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones

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When Dan Jones was writing his books on The Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses, he left a Henry V-sized gap, as he knew he wanted to devote an entire book to the man; this is that book. Starting from his birth in 1386 and ending with his death in 1422 at the age of 35, the book is divided in half; first Henry as Prince (actually first as lord’s son), then Henry as King. Covering his entire life, Jones doesn’t just hit the […]

“One of Harold Nicolson’s many endearing traits was to invent occasions brought about by some preposterous and improbable action on his part.”

Harold Nicolson: A Biography (Volume I: 1886-1929) by James Lees-Milne

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One of my continued passions is Edwardian era history and as I keep reading more books about it, some people pop up over and over again until finally I either buy a biography or their letters and diaries to figure out what they were up to. Harold Nicolson is one of those people who show up in every book you will read about the 1900s through to the 1960s, as he was involved in huge amounts of historical events and had a very busy social […]

This one is wonderful.

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre

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The problem, for me, when trying to finish a whole Cannonball, is that I read a lot of very long books that take me a long time to finish, and then I spend a week in a book coma, and then it’s July. So around August/September, I think oh shoot this is not going to work, and then I find a ton of random novellas so that I can reach my goal. The choice of these shorter books is based solely on feasibility (length). Sometimes […]

“You cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be”

Eleanor by David Michaelis

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The book: Eleanor by David Michaelis is a single-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Why I read it: I’ve always thought Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the more interesting First Ladies. While I still think that as an adult, as a child a big part of that was from seeing “Annie” so many times. Having grandparents that lived through the Great Depression was part of it, too. When this book was released it seemed to get a certain amount of fanfare–enough, anyway, for me to notice and add […]

Silent—and Silenced—Stories

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

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cbr17bingo: migrant I knew little about Iran and nothing about refugees prior to reading this memoir, which is an important, and at times distressing, book. Dina Nayeri primarily writes about her family’s flight from Iran, with the book broken into five sections that correspond to elements of this flight: Escape, Camp, Asylum, Assimilation, and Cultural Repatriation. Told from a non-linear perspective and interspersed with stories of other refugees’ lives, Nayeri depicts the arduous, often trauma-filled journey that refugees go on and the long-lasting impact of […]



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