Q: Which Alice Munro stories are we reading for December?

A: The last eight stories her "Selected Stories" collection.  Those are:

"Fits"
"Friends of my Youth"
"Meneseteung"
"Differently"
"Carried Away"
"The Albanian Virgin"
"A Wilderness Station"
"Vandals"

We'll meet December 19. Hope to see you there!

Poe's Works for Oct 17 Meeting

Here's a list of what we plan to discuss. If you'd like to read these online, the stories and poem can all be found at http://www.poestories.com/ .  His essay on "The Philosophy of Composition" can be read here )

As always at Classics Revisited, finishing the reading is not required! Feel free to join us even if you aren't able to complete all of them.

The Philosophy of Composition.
The Raven
Descent into the Maelstrom
The Purloined Letter
The Gold Bug
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Masque of the Red Death
The Cask of Amontillado
The Tell-Tale Heart
William Wilson
Ligeia

2013-2014 Season

 

September 19:  100 Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez
October 17: Selected Short Pieces by Edgar Allan Poe
November 21: The Good Soldier / Ford Madox Ford
December 19:  Selected Stories / Alice Munro
January 16: Woman Warrior / Maxine Hong Kingston
February 20: Metamorphosis / Kafka AND Notes from the Underground / Dostoyevsky
March 20:  Sister Carrie / Theodore Dreiser
April 17:  Herzog / Saul Bellow
May 15: Selected Poetry / Robert Frost

Long Summer Read for September 2014:  Don Quixote / Cervantes

When title selections are made for Poe, Munro, and Frost, we will post them on this blog.

Resources for Emily Dickinson Poems

The list of poems we'll be discussing appears here; if you have trouble finding them in a printed collection of Dickinson's poems, you can easily find them online along with some wonderfully enriching study resources.

Emily Dickinson's Lexicon: gives definitions of all the words ED used, taken from the specific dictionary she used.

http://www.poemhunter.com/emily-dickinson/

Tips for Reading Emily Dickinson's Poems

Samples of the small scraps of paper ED wrote her poems on

An artist's tribute to ED's poems and her "miraculous year"

Major Characteristics of ED's poems

Aaron Copeland's "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson"

Out of Time? Can't Find a Copy?

 

This month our selection is Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. As Hardy books go, this one is fairly cheerful. If you don't have time to hunt down a copy, try reading it online here , at "Online Literature."  Or trying listening to a very nice, gentle reading of it on Librivox, here.

Meanwhile, here is, in part, the poem from which the title was taken:

Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard
Thomas Gray,  1751

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Emily Dickinson Selections

In April we will be discussing selected poems by Emily Dickinson, and that selection has been made! Here's the list, along with the standard editorial number which will enable you to find them easily in whatever collection you may use.

214 : I taste a liquor never brewed
241 : I like a look of agony
249 : Wild nights, wild nights!
258 : There’s a certain slant of light
280 : I felt a funeral in my brain
328 : A bird came down the walk
341 : After great pain
414 : Twas like a maelstrom, with a notch
435 : Much madness is divinest sense
465 : I heard a fly buzz when I died
510 : It was not death
632  : The brain is wider than the sky!
741 : Tell all the truth but tell it slant
970 : Color—caste—denomination
986  : A narrow fellow in the grass
1540 : As imperceptively as grief
1593 : There came a wind like a bugle
1740 : Sweet is the swamp with its secrets

Great Free Read: Annotated Moby Dick

We already read Moby Dick for one of our Long Summer Reads, but the Leviathan rates more than a single shot! Lower for him whenever you find yourself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it's a damp drizzly November in your soul...

The nicest way to read him is maybe an antique edition with Rockwell Kent's woodcuts, but failing that, here's another idea that has its advantages: a free online annotated version. Fire up your iPad, prop it on a pillow, and follow the whale...

This selection begins with my favorite paragraph. If I could string up a hammock in my living room to read it in, I surely would.