Monday, May 13, 2024

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its ninth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Mr. Palomar

Anton Chekhov, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov

E.T.A. Hoffman, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

Helen Keller, The World I Live In

Katherine Mansfield, Stories

Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, We Others: New and Selected Stories, Voices in the Night, Disruptions

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, Collected Short Stories

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children

United States of America v. Donald Trump (the Jack Smith indictment)

Thanks to the translators who brought several of these works to us: Anthea Bell, Maria Bloshteyn, Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Slater, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and William Weaver.

The FSRC is forging ahead with Chekhov’s Peasants and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett).

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, and 2023.

comments: 2

Geo-B said...

This is why college students aren't reading, because you're doing all the reading! Give it a pause, and let someone else do some of the reading!

Michael Leddy said...

Ha! George, you made me think of the advice Erik Satie said his doctor gave him: “Smoke, my friend. If you don’t, someone else will smoke in your place.”

Alas, the club charter makes it impossible for us to have anyone read for us.