Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Frat Boys and Mean Girls, Gilded Age Edition

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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CBR BINGO 14: Scandal, because heroine Lily Bart is undone by scandals The House of Mirth has been on my list since I first fell in love with The Age of Innocence a quarter of a century ago. Nobody writes the glamour and treachery of Old New York as deliciously as Edith Wharton. I’ve been putting off writing this review because I wasn’t sure how I felt about the novel. I definitely prefer it to Ethan Frome, but it falls short of my favorite Wharton. Yet as time […]

Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

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There’s a running joke at my job about this book. Most teachers there hate it and almost all kids hate it. And yet, people keep teaching it. I labeled an email “Another thought I had about Ethan Frome” to a colleague and then cut and pasted the entire text of the novella to them in the body of the email, which should be fun if I ever get FOIAed. Anyway, I love this book and think it’s really good. I also understand why kids don’t. […]

The Circumscription of Women and Men

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a compelling look at the mores of the upper class in 1800’s New York City and particularly how such mores dictate and limit lives, particularly women’s. The story follows upper class Newland Archer, who is torn between his demure and incurious fiancée and the independent and […]

“Archer…dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so”

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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This is my first review of the year. I have been reading a lot, and enjoying what I read, but I’m just not ready to think about what I read. I was partway through The Age of Innocence when I realized this was a re-read, though from a decade or so ago. We meet Newland Archer (what a name!), a New York society gentleman in his early 20s, as he mostly sleepwalks through society – getting engaged to an appropriate ingénue, moving from home to […]

A girl came out of lawyer Royall’s house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood at the doorstep.

Summer by Edith Wharton

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Don’t let the seasonal image of idyllic warm months fool you; this one is pretty bleak. Charity is seventeen, more or less an orphan, and leaves her small rural life with relatives, to move to town and work with a local lawyer. The lawyer is stern and officious, and more offensive, he offers to marry her. She is repulsed and turns her attention to a hot local boy, Lucas. They flirt, it’s exciting, they have sex a bunch of times, and she gets pregnant. Later, […]

Gangs of New York

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

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Cbr11bingo Award Winner, bingo #7 Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature with The Age of Innocence in 1921. I’ve decided that Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, right up there with Toni Morrison and Jane Austen. In past CBRs, I’ve reviewed The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome and marveled at her artistry with words and her dissection of the American class system, particularly New York society, at the turn of the 20th century. Her novels […]



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