Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Towards the end of my first time in Indonesia I stayed in a house on the edge of the jungle and dreamed the worst nightmares I have known since I was a child.”

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos by Richard Lloyd Parry

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CBR15Bingo: Asia & Oceania (all about Indonesia and experiencing the uprising that unseated Suharto) I picked this up because I loved The People Who Eat Darkness, Parry’s later work about trying to catch a murderer in Japan. It is such a great book that I’ve been wanting to read other work by him, so I was happy to find out that he’d written this part memoir, part on the spot reporting about the time he’d spent in Indonesia as a young journalist. I didn’t know […]

So, Do You Like Knives?

The Martial Arts of Indonesia: A Guide to Pencak Silat, Kuntao and Traditional Weapons by Donn F. Draeger

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  Yes, I am really amusing myself here for picking a ‘sportsball’ book where balls don’t really feature in the sports of focus. To make up for that though—as I discovered—nearly everything else that you could think of has been used as a weapon in an Indonesian martial art at some point. This includes knives, more knives, swords, shields, sticks, more knives, whips, chains, and teeth. And the knives? More knives than spam in Monty Python. Some of these people folks really love their knives. […]

Let’s Start of the Year With a Little Non-Fiction

A Brief History of Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast Asia's Largest Nation by Tim Hannigan

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  As an Australian, I have long lamented the fact that we see ourselves as on the periphery of South East Asia rather than an integral part of the region. And while we spend our time at school mostly learning about the history of the ‘Anglosphere’, we seem to have very little curiosity about our neighbours – and this is rather disappointing. After reading This Earth of Mankind late last year, I realised that there were considerable gaps in my own knowledge of Indonesia, who […]

“In the end… the issue is always the same: European against Native, against me.”

This Earth of Mankind (Buru Quartet 1) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

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If the last book I reviewed here was straightforward to get my head around, this one is the exact opposite. Fluffy Sherlock Holmes homage vs. Indonesian political drama? I don’t think you could get much different. I have had This Earth of Mankind on my to-read list for quite a while. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is probably one of Indonesia’s most well-known authors, and I always had the intention of picking up one of his novels. (Translated, of course; as the best I could manage in […]

Indonesian best-seller about poverty, education and hope

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The Rainbow Troops: A Novel is not so much a novel as a memoir or collection of vignettes from the author’s childhood in Indonesia. It is an eye-opener about life in the world’s fourth most populated country, the largest Muslim-majority country. Hirata is Indonesia’s best selling writer of all time (according to the book blurb) and The Rainbow Troops was a huge best-seller in Indonesia and abroad. Hirata provides a vivid depiction of the poverty that many Indonesians experience and of the hope that education […]



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