It's been too long since I last posted. In these past months, my contemporary fiction book club has disbanded, and I have since started up a classics reading group. We, in the contemporary group, were simply not enjoying our picks. We were consistently disappointed with the quality or the depressing tones of our choices. We didn't join a book club to be depressed!
I have been longing for quite a while to catch up on all the literature I missed out on in high school. I received a substanard education in a rural Kansas institution (the emphasis being on Kansas history--really, how much is there to learn about Kansas!!!) and then read mostly politically correct and obscure European literature in college. I crave to read the works of the great dead white men and women!!!! Tolstoy, Austen, Bronte, Dostoevsky, Defoe, Elliott, Lawrence, Trollope, Dumas... We are beginning with Willa Cather's My Antonia (an-ton-ee-ya). It's a short novel, set in the 19th-century American Midwest; a farming tale of struggle, a love affair with the prairie. It's a story of immigrant survival in a rough new world. I have finished it and, in my opinion, it was a worthwhile read, if for nothing else but the horror stories the immigrants bring with them to the new world and the beautiful language Cather uses to illustrate her infatuation with the land.
When I began reading, I was very confused- I thought this book was about a girl named "Antonia," yet it read as though it was revolving around the life of Jim Burden, a young orphan, sent to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. In truth, it is about Jim, who is, from first sight, smitten with Antonia and tracks her life from that of a young girl to mature woman. The pace of the narrative varies: sometimes moving at a snail's pace, other times rushing by quickly.
(I'm writing this now in Nov 08, a long time since I started this post- I can no longer remember the details of My Antonia, but generally that our group was rather unimpressed. There were a few memorable scenes, however we chalked it up to an "interesting" reading experience (you readers know what that means!)
When I began reading, I was very confused- I thought this book was about a girl named "Antonia," yet it read as though it was revolving around the life of Jim Burden, a young orphan, sent to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. In truth, it is about Jim, who is, from first sight, smitten with Antonia and tracks her life from that of a young girl to mature woman. The pace of the narrative varies: sometimes moving at a snail's pace, other times rushing by quickly.
(I'm writing this now in Nov 08, a long time since I started this post- I can no longer remember the details of My Antonia, but generally that our group was rather unimpressed. There were a few memorable scenes, however we chalked it up to an "interesting" reading experience (you readers know what that means!)
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