Friday, May 15, 2020

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our fifth year we read twenty-one books and a book’s worth of uncollected short stories, and we climbed one mountain, Mount Musil. In non-chronological order:

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Professor

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders)

Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored

Olivia Jaimes, Nancy’s Genius Plan

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

Guy de Maupassant, Afloat

Duncan Minshull, ed., Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction, uncollected stories

Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Stefan Zweig, Journeys

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, Dmitri Nabokov and Vladmir Nabokov, Douglas Parmée, Will Stone, Sophie Wilkins.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

comments: 6

Slywy said...

You’ve been retired five years???

Michael Leddy said...

Let me check. :)

Yes, five. Thirty years of teaching.

Fresca said...

Jane Eyre?
I don't remember---did you quote and comment on that when you were reading it?

I love that book, but I've never read anything else by Charlotte Bronte---would you recommend The Professor?

Michael Leddy said...

Not yet, but there was something about the 1943 movie.

I would recommend The Professor. It’s an unusual picture of courtship and marriage with an undeniable and barely coded same-sex element to the story. The Internet Archive has copies.

Frex said...

Thanks, I'll give it a try when libraries open--don't like reading novels online. I've always meant to read more CB.

Frex = Fresca

Michael Leddy said...

You can download it and read on a device. They have a beautiful edition from 1900, but it’s missing a page. Other editions too.