The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its tenth 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:
Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairytales and Stories
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Essays
Giovanni Boccaccio, Mrs. Rosie and the Priest (four stories from the Decameron)
Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Anton Chekhov, “Peasants” and Other Stories
Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters
Maureen Duffy, That’s How It Was
Gerard Manley Hopkins, As kingfishers catch fire (selected poems and journal excerpts)
Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven
Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts
Alice Munro, Dear Life
Vladimir Nabokov, The Complete Stories
Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger, The Wine-Dark Sea
John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down
Thanks to the translators who brought several of these works to us: Avril Bardoni, Adrienne Foulke,Constance Garnett, Peter Hainsworth, Erik Christian Haugaard, Richard Howard, Tess Lewis, Dmitri Nabokov, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Many books. Really many!
comments: 10
It would be great if you gave your grades first each book: Elaine/Michael B/A-
Otherwise we won’t know whether a book comes recommended.
We both gave up grading written work when we retired from college teaching — that's my out. But we tend to choose books that we have some reason to think we'll both want to read. I'd say that the only books here that I'm not really enthusiastic about are Andersen (just not my thing, but it's an important book for Elaine, so I'm willing to read it) and Steinbeck (strangely timely but not great fiction).
And neither of us wants to resd more Alice Munro in light of recent revelations.
A worthy list.
So glad that you listed the translators. They determine whether a book is faithful to the author’s intent and, based on the prose, an enjoyable read. I found this out from side-by-side comparisons of different translations of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series. When I can, I stick with Penguin Classics.
Your comment about Alice Munro had me scratching my head. I just read about her daughter’s allegations. She’s off my TBR list.
Always credit the translators. It’s always annoying to me a translator’s name is missing.
FRESCA here:
I love your FSRG—
and, ten years? I remember when you started!
Do you or Elaine ever read things solo—are there books one doesn’t want to read but the other must?
The revelations about Munro are disturbing, but no worse than many other writers I read.
How do you balance the personal/political life of creators and their work?
—Fresca
“FSRC” not G
—Fresca
Yes, we always have other books going on, or sort of going on. I just read some Cornell Woolrich, and I have Fernando Pessoa’s Selected Prose to start. Elaine is reading Jeremy Eichler’s Time's Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War. We started Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet as a FSRC selection (lol) during the pandemic, but Elaine just didn’t like it, so we switched to something else and I kept going with Pessoa.
I don’t know any general rule for sorting out the life of the writer (or artist or musician) and the work. Sometimes the personal can be so appalling that it cuts any willingness to engage the work. And sometimes I'm willing to engage the work regardless. I suppose I’d say that knowing what we now know about Alice Munro, I don’t care enough about her writing to want to read any more.
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