Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Updating the classics

Much Ado About Nada by Uzma Jalaluddin

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Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Retelling (modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion) CBR16 Bingo: Bollywood (set in Canada with desi protagonists) The absolutely last place Nada Syed wants to be is the big annual Muslim convention in downtown Toronto. She is nearly 30 years old, single and lives at home with her parents and two brothers. If she goes to the convention, there is a high chance that she’ll run into her old mentor, formerly her mother’s best friend. She might also run into her mentor’s […]

Jane Austen fan fiction with murder!

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray

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Mr. Knightley and his wife, Emma (formerly Miss Woodhouse), have been happily married for several years. They are inviting a number of friends to a houseparty; Mr. and Mrs Darcy of Pemberley with their son Jonathan, Colonel and Mrs. Brandon (no children yet, as they are very newly married), Captain and Mrs. Wentworth,  Edmund and Fanny Bertram and Miss Juliet Tilney, daughter of  Henry and Catherine Tilney. Unfortunately, they also receive an unexpected and unwanted addition to the party, Mr Wickham, who has unfinished business with several of the members there. The Knightleys would […]

I don’t know if you’ve heard of this Jane Austen person, but she’s pretty good. She’s going places.

Persuasion by Jane Austin

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At the risk of sounding melodramatic, there is a feeling that I love, but don’t get to experience that often. It’s a kind of melancholic beauty, piercing in its intensity, with a haunted mien and nebulous structure that can be hard to pin down. It is the beauty of autumn rain, dark chocolate, and sad songs. The beauty of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. The beauty of Joy Williams singing “Don’t Let Me Down”. The beauty of unrequited love, and […]

Reading Austen Is Really Just a British Travel Guide

Persuasion by Jane Austen

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Any time I read Austen, I find myself much more interested in the settings than the actual story. This may be because I’m not a fan of romance, and at their core, most of Austen’s work revolve around character’s getting together. But her ability to place me so specifically in her settings is one of my favorite parts of the Austen novels. In Persuasion, we move from the English countryside to the shore town of Lyme, and lastly to Bath. Until reading this, I’d never heard […]

Even more mannered than most

Persuasion by Jane Austen

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  First off, may I say how incongruous this cover is for this book? Anne Elliot WOULD NEVER with that red harlot dress. Of all of Jane Austen’s protagonists, Anne Elliot is the mildest doormat to be found. Fanny Price endured a fair amount of abuse but took it because she was poor and relying on the kindness of others to have shelter and food. Anne Elliot gives up her fiance because her family thinks it is a poor match, and then she watches as […]

So Much More Shade Than I Remembered (and I thought I remembered a decent amount)

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This was a reread for me though it’s been more than a decade since my last read.  Instead of going through the plot since I think most people are familiar with the bare bones of the plot, I’m just going to share a few random thoughts I had while listening to this novel. So doing Austen as an audio book is interesting.  It was obvious when reading Persuasion that Anne Elliot was the only one with any common sense and that everyone around her was […]



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