December 24, 2012

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - January 28, 2013

We'll discuss The Hunchback of Notre Dame on January 28.  Location TBD.  Check back for more supplemental materials.

About the book:

Info about the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris, or the period:
  • Maps of Paris from late 1300s through 1700s
  • Description of a walking tour of Paris in the Middle Ages, with pictures and some brief history.
  • A View on Cities entry, with pictures, map, some info about Notre-Dame
  • Ptolemy's world map of 1482
  • It's worth it to play around with Google Earth to see Paris street layout, and to see photos of Notre-Dame and the surrounding area. 


December 14, 2012

Best Books of 2012

Here's a blog post by "Largehearted Boy" that compiles links to lots of lists of the best books of 2012.

And here's The Daily Circuit for December 31, 2012, wherein Kerry Miller talks with book reviewers from the LA Times and the Washington Post about the best books of 2012.

December 5, 2012

O Pioneers, Willa Cather - December 14, 2012

We'll meet December 14 to discuss O Pioneers by Willa Cather.

Supplemental materials:

  • Text available free via Project Gutenberg
  • Willa Cather Archive - O Pioneers! page
  • The Walt Whitman poem, Pioneers! O Pioneers!, which must surely have been an inspiration for Cather's title.
  • Wikipedia entry for O Pioneers!  Mentions this fabulous quote:  In a 1921 interview for Bookman, Willa Cather said, "I decided not to 'write' at all, - simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I'd forgotten."
  • Rock band named itself O Pioneers, creating for itself a hipness deficit that is hard to overcome, even with cool black T-shirts with open jack-knife image that you can order here.