TIL

Today I Learned (TIL) that out of the 10,000 lines in Milton's original manuscript for Paradise Lost, only 798 have survived. Learn more about the manuscript and see some cool pictures here!

2022/23 Season Reading List

September 15 (long summer read): Paradise Lost / John Milton 

October 20: The Good Earth / Pearl S. Buck

November 17: Democracy in America volume 1 / Alexis de Tocqueville

December 15: Maus volumes 1 & 2 / Art Spiegelman

January 19: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn / Betty Smith

February 16: Selected Poems / Gwendolyn Brooks

March 16: The Door / Magda Szabo

April 20: Parable of the Sower / Octavia Butler

May 18: Tinker Taylor Solider Spy / John le Carré

September 21 (long summer read): Catch 22 / Joseph Heller 

2021-2022 Season Reading List

 Hi Everyone! Blogger no longer lets me update the sidebars where you see our previous book lists appear, so I'll have to use a fresh post to share the information about 2021-2022. At some point we might have to move to a more cooperative venue, but for now this will do.

September 16:  (Long Summer Read)  David Copperfield / Charles Dickens

October 21: The House of the Spirits / Isabel Allende

November 18: Love in the Time of Cholera / Gabriel Garcia Marquez

December 16:  The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  / Agatha Christie

January 20:  The Art of War / Sun Tzu

February 17: Narrative of the Life of  Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself 

March 17: Tristram Shandy / Laurence Sterne

April 21:  Selected Poetry / William Butler Yeats

May 19: Time and Again / Jack Finney

September 15: (Long Summer Read) Paradise Lost / John Milton

Prior to the April meeting we will post a list of the Yeats poems that are selected for discussion.

Frederick Lewis Allen's "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's"

 

Portrait of Frederick Lewis Allen

https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/tag/frederick-lewis-allen/

Wordsworth Poems for December 19, 2019 meeting

Selections we will be reading:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

My heart leaps up

We are Seven

Michael

Resolution and Independence

Ode to Duty

The Solitary Reaper

To a Skylark

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour

The world is too much with us; late and soon

Surprised by Joy, impatient as the Wind

Tintern Abbey

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

The Lucy Poems:
  Strange fits of passion I have known
  She dwelt among the untrodden ways
  I traveled among unknown men
  Three years she grew in sun and shower
  A slumber did my spirit seal

Two recent additions to the list, 12/14/2019:
  Nutting
  The Tables Turned

Wordsworth's complete poetical works can be found here

Borges Selections

For our May 16, 2019 meeting we are discussing the following short stories from Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions:

The Library of Babel
Three Versions of Judas
The Immortal
The Dead Man
The Writing of the God
A Dialog About a Dialog
A Dialog Between Dead Men
Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
Inferno 1, 32
Borges and I
On Exactitude in Science
In Memoriam, JFK
His End and His Beginning
A Weary Man's Utopia
Shakespeare's Memory

Montaigne Essays for January meeting

Following are the titles we will be reading for January 17, 2019 from the essays of Michel De Montaigne."

On Sadness (aka "On Sorrow")

On Fear

On Smells

On Books

On Experience

These are listed in chronological order. David notes that "On Experience" is the longest essay Montaigne wrote, but also the last one, and is worth the time.

The library has editions of Montaigne available, or you can read them free online:

 Project Gutenberg

Amazon Kindle edition  Volume 1  and  Volume 2  

If you are a resident Kalamazoo Public Library card-holder, you can choose from several different editions on "Hoopla"