Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


There are Never Enough Modern Retellings of Pride and Prejudice

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

by Leave a Comment

Timeless satire for the win. The many adaptations of Jane’s Pride and Prejudice only strengthen my admiration of the sly intelligence in the original. Apparently this is the 4th book of the Austen Project, what a delightful discovery. Liz Bennet is pulled back into her hometown Chicago and dysfunctional family dynamics when her father has a health scare. You will recognize the rest of the Bennet characters immediately. Author Curtis Sittenfeld is just loyal enough to the original’s wit, characters and storyline for comfort. This […]

“If a book is well-written, I always find it too short”

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

by Leave a Comment

4.5 stars CBR17 Bingo: Black (a book with a black cover) I had completely forgotten that I read and reviewed this book back in 2016. My original review can be found here. My plot summary of the more than 200-year-old novel can be found in my previous review. Nevertheless, my reading experience this time around was different enough from earlier times that I wanted to write about some of my thoughts and observations, not to mention some of the points of discussion that came up during my […]

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

by 1 Comment

You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail. ― Joseph Heller, Catch-22 “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, […]

Things are different in Wales

Ivon by Michael Aylwin

Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

by Leave a Comment

CBRBingo – Sportsball and People As I read Ivon, I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a much better book if Jasper Fforde had written it.  Fforde is a master of taking a crazy premise and populating it with such skillfully drawn living breathing humans that the setting becomes real. This is Aylwin’s first novel, and he isn’t there yet. In the world of Ivon, sport is everything.  Set in our future, after a series of pandemics that killed off all but the fittest, almost all of humanity […]

In which A Square contemplates the universe

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

by Leave a Comment

Flatland is broken up into two parts. In the first A Square explains to the reader his universe which is called Flatland, a two dimensional world. There are only two dimensions in Flatland: one that runs North to South and one that run West to East. All women are Lines and there is a separate caste system based around the number of sides one has. In such system, the lowest caste are isosceles triangles, for how can one be worthy of respect if they are […]

“All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.”

by 2 Comments

On a prose level, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed the first two, which were extremely clever and a bit raw. Here, with Patrick sober (for several years, it’s implied), he once again is one among many points of view, just as he was in the first book as a five year old, when his parents’ dinner guests held most of the narrative focus. Here the party is for some duke or other on his birthday, and the Princess Margaret is […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo