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"








 

Welcome to the 13th Season of Classics Revisited!

At the top left you'll see the titles we'll be reading this season, beginning with Dante's Inferno, the first book of his Divine Comedy. Choose any edition or translation of it you like best. Of the verse translations, some attempt to imitate the sound of the Italian terza rima, others try to render the content more accurately.

There are more versions of Inferno to choose from than the other two volumes because translators who start out intending to publish all three often stop after Inferno. Several versions can be read free online, including Longfellow's translation, or listened to for free on LibriVox.org.

In January, check back here for a list of the essays by Montaigne that we'll be reading.

The stories we are reading for the January 18 2018 meeting

All from "William Trevor: Collected Stories":

A Meeting in Middle Age
The Ballroom of Romance
The News from Ireland
Two More Gallants

History Today on "Moll Flanders"

After you've finished reading "Moll Flanders," maybe you would like to read Sian Rees'  2011 book about "Moll Flanders."

From the "History Today" review:

If you thought Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders was the 18th century’s Belle de Jour then prepare to stand corrected. Most often portrayed as a bodice-ripping wench sexing up the Georgians, of all fiction’s heroines Defoe’s Moll has perhaps been done the greatest disservice in dramatised adaptations. As Siân Rees’ new book reminds us, Moll was, in fact, not really conceived as an 18th-century gal at all. Although the novel was published in 1722, Defoe imagines his heroine putting pen to paper to recount ‘her’ tale in the late 17th century. By then she is looking back on a long life lived among befrilled Jacobeans and penitent Puritans rather than amid the boisterous and bewigged Hanoverians. Nor was mistress Moll that much of a wench, or at least not in the way subsequent scriptwriters have imagined. To be sure Defoe uses a lengthy subtitle to brand her as ‘twelve years a whore’ – condemning Moll to an inevitably fleshy cinematic fate – yet he also adds that she was ‘five times a wife’. It does not make for such good telly, but it was sex and love within marriages and misfortunate affairs (not procured, prostituted sex) that Defoe featured in Moll Flanders.

 You'll find the rest of the article about it here.

Welcome to our 11th Season of Classics Revisited!

First up is Charles Dickens' Bleak House.  From the "Charles Dickens Page," here is a map of the London locations where the events in the story take place.

We'll be discussing these Keats poems...

Keats' life mask, 1816

 ...during Classics Revisited on December 17, 2015

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

The Eve of St. Agnes

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Ode to Psyche

Ode to a Nightingale

Ode on Melancholy

Ode on a Grecian Urn

To Autumn

Bright Star

Optional letters: (1) December 21, 27, 1817, to George and Thomas Keats, on, among other things, "Negative Capability"; (2) October 27, 1818, To Richard Woodhouse, "A Poet Has No Identity."

A quote just for Classics Revisited fans...

...from Andrea Barrett. Turns out she's one of us!

"Every year I try to read five or six books that I know I should have read in my twenties. There's some pleasure in reading those now, at this late date. They're fresh for me, and the experience can be dazzling. It's an amazing pleasure, it turns out, to read Paradise Lost for the first time at age thirty-eight."

Paris Review, "Art of Fiction" No. 180

NY Post article on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

"The Famous Robert Frost Poem We've Read Wrong Forever" is a review of David Orr's new book "The Road Not Taken."

"...The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism," he continues. "It's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives."

You'll find the complete article (until such time as the Post takes it down) right here:
forever/http://nypost.com/2015/08/16/the-famous-robert-frost-poem-weve-read-wrong-forever/

Sshhhhhhhh!

Nobody gets to see this except people who visit this blog!

Our title for January 2015 is Andrea Barrett's Voyage of the Narwhal.  It happens that The Paris Review published an "Art of Fiction" interview featuring her, and it's an excellent piece....but you can only find it right here.

Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

For the historical record, these are the stories we are reading and discussing. They were the first six stories in the "Collected Stories," plus two others that members suggested:

Gimpel the Fool
The Gentleman of Cracow
Joy
The Little Shoemakers
The Unseen
The Spinoza of Market Street
Yentl the Yeshiva Boy
Something is There

Q: Which Robert Frost poems are we reading for May?

A: Here they are, all 26 of them, in alpha order to make them easier to find in your index of collected works! But if you don't have Frost's collected poems, try online, googling by title. You can find many of them here: http://www.bartleby.com/people/Frost-Ro.html

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

Birches

Brown's Descent, or, The Willy-Nilly Slide

Death of the Hired Man, The

Desert Places

Design

Directive

Drumlin Woodchuck, A

Fire and Ice

Hill Wife, The

Home Burial

Mending Wall

Need of Being Versed in Country Things, The

Old Man's Winter Night, An

Out, Out--

Paul's Wife

Provide, Provide

Road Not Taken, The

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Subverted Flower, The

Tree at my Window

Two Tramps in Mud Time

West-Running Brook

Witch of Coos, The

Wood-Pile, The

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.