Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Reader, this was an absolute delight

Reader, I Married Him by Tracy Chevalier (editor)

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Reader, we all know how we feel about Jane Eyre. We also know how we feel about that fateful sentence: Reader, I married him. This collection of 21 stories, created to celebrate Charlotte Bronte’s 200th birthday in 2016 and written by an all-female team of authors, all have strong feelings on the matter as well, and these stories run the gamut from the reverent to the satirical. This collection is a jewelry box in your grandmother’s attic full of treasure and cheap pieces alike, and […]

“And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.”

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

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I am a big fan of Lyndsay Faye, but I couldn’t really pick up her 2016 work Jane Steele until now because I had not read Jane Eyre until late last year. While I’m sure you could read Jane Steele without reading Jane Eyre, I don’t know if you’d really see all that Faye is accomplishing in this work if you did. For that reason alone, I’m glad I waited. I love a quality retelling and Faye is absolutely delivering on that front. Jane Steele […]

Jane sees dead people

My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, & Jodi Meadows

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I completely ADORED My Lady Jane a few years ago. It was so refreshing and funny and unique, with such a great audio narrator. I had high hopes for this next book in the series and HALLELUJAH it delivered. It’s not quite as shockingly quirky as My Lady Jane (nobody’s fiance regularly turns into a horse for one), but what it lacked in quirk, it made up in literary references and jokes. Most of the Bronte family gets roped into the narrative here and it’s […]

The madwoman in the attic.

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I don’t know why I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy this. I nearly always react poorly to post-modernism. But, I really *wanted* to enjoy it. Every time I’ve read Jane Eyre, I’ve thought Bertha Rochester, née Mason, got a really shit deal. I’ve also thought it was really suspect that we don’t actually get any evidence of her going mad prior to being locked in an attic for years and years. I mean, if I’d been locked in an attic for that long maybe I would start […]

“I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” (BINGO 5!)

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For many, Jane Eyre is part of the reading undertaken during their education. For some it is read in high school, for others college, but for me it never joined the reading lists of my various courses. In fact, until several years ago when I read Agnes Grey I had read nothing at all by any of the Brontes. It is however fully in the milieu of a reader’s culture; I understood it enough to get the jokes in Texts from Jane Eyre and Hark! […]

Blackout! One case where I prefer the literary criticism to the actual novel

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Bingo Square: This Old Thing I read Jane Eyre in high school for fun when I was trying to read classics because I thought I needed to better myself.  I can’t say that was a very successful venture, since I didn’t end up liking that many of them without a teacher’s guidance to point out some of the deeper meaning (although I loved East of Eden and Anna Karenina).  Jane Eyre was definitely one I didn’t enjoy that much because it was long and boring. […]



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