Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Two Stories, Rethought

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Thor Vol 1: The Goddess of Thunder by Jason Aaron

by Leave a Comment

  I’m a big Jane Austen fan and Pride and Prejudice is my favorite of her works. Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld is a modern-day retelling of this classic story that stays pretty faithful to the spirit of the original. Elizabeth Bennet is here re-imagined as a writer for a women’s magazine. She is 38 and living in New York City. She and her elder sister, Jane, unexpectedly return to Cincinnati after their father has a heart attack. They find their family and their childhood home […]

Yes, I Will Read Anything Related to P&P

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

by 1 Comment

  Bingo Notes: This is my Remix square. It’s a modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen. Eligible tells the story of a modern Bennet family, set in Cincinnati, Ohio and updated to include things like Reality TV, CrossFit, and the trans community. In this telling, Liz is a magazine writer, Jane is a yoga instructor, Kitty & Lydia both work at a CrossFit gym, and Mary is hiding away completing one Master’s Degree after another. This story opens with the sisters more spread out (Jane […]

Rich People Problems

You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

by Leave a Comment

  I needed a bit of a palate cleanser, and short story collections almost always fit that bill nicely. I had already read Prep by the same author years ago. I remember liking it, but not really identifying with the characters very well, they were a little too outside my personal experience. I had kind of the same feeling with some of the stories in this collection. A lot of them are really great, and overall I did like this collection, but Sittenfeld does tend […]

“There’s no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.”

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

by 3 Comments

Last year I unexpectedly enjoyed Pride and Prejudice during Cannonball Bingo; I decided to read Curtis Sittenfeld’s modern retelling because I have enjoyed several other books she’s written. Unfortunately this adaptation is often times hampered by its premise and would have been better served not trying to fit so tightly into an Austen shaped boxed. While I usually find myself screaming at film adaptations that stray too far from the original I actually wish Sittenfeld been a bit looser with her translation like Clueless, another Austen retelling,or She’s the Man, […]

I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremony

by Leave a Comment

You Think It, I’ll Say It – 4/5 Stars You’ll see in my second review here that I was going to start this one off with a book I really didn’t like, but then luckily I read a book I really did like. Curtis Sittenfeld rubs people the wrong way sometimes and she also sometimes rubs people the right way. I think a major reason for this is that this book is a pretty accurate portrayal of middle-class whiteness without apology toward or away from […]

Three potentially good stories smashed into one mediocre novel

by Leave a Comment

“She would say that we create our own reality-that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.” Daisy and Violet Shramm are identical twin sisters who grew up in St. Louis to an ambivalent mother and a much older father. They are also psychic. In the more present day Daisy, now going by Kate, is a stay at home mom to two young kids and the wife of a college professor, Jeremy Tucker, who teaches geology at the local university. She has renounced her […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo