Willa Cather Reading Week

By -
Heavenali is hosting a Willa Cather reading week in December, and I am looking forward to participating!  Check out her post to see what's on offer and to sign up.  Heavenali says:
Willa Cather is now certainly regarded as one of the great American writers, a writer I re-connected with a couple of years ago, and I am now trying to read everything she wrote. I have read several of her novels already, have another five sitting here waiting to be read, but as yet have not read any of her short stories. A reading week therefore is just what I need to focus on reading some Cather, and share my enthusiasm for her work. I would love to get lots of people reading her novels and stories, talking about her and sharing thoughts about her books on blogs.

I am not sure yet what I want to do.  My Ántonia is on my CC list, so this is a nice opportunity, but the truth is that My Ántonia is a re-read and I have never read the other two books in the triad--or any other Cather, for that matter!  So perhaps I should read O Pioneers! and/or The Song of the Lark.  I'll get all of them out of the library and see what happens.  I will certainly read something that week, though!



Comments

  1. Ruth @ with freedom and booksNovember 25, 2014 at 3:28 PM

    Can't you switch My Antonia for one of the other two? I won't tell. Either way, I don't think you can go wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LoryNovember 25, 2014 at 3:54 PM

    I'm looking forward to this week. I got ahead of myself and already read Sapphira and the Slave Girl, but I'll post my review during the week. Maybe I'll read something else then too. O Pioneers is a good one to read next, if you liked My Antonia.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanNovember 25, 2014 at 4:38 PM

    I did like My Antonia when I read it...years ago. I figured I should refresh, but I think I'd like to read O Pioneers too, at least.

    ReplyDelete
  4. FaithNovember 28, 2014 at 3:05 PM

    I just finished rereading Shadows on the Rock. I loved it. I think of O Pioneer's as a slightly lesser My Antonia. I don't know why that is though. I have never finished The Song of the Lark. That was one of the few Cather books that didn't hold my interest. But I have been thinking I need to reread Death Comes for the Archbishop and Sapphira and Slave Girl.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more