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Flannery O'Connor

I spent a year reading Shakespeare, which turned into 18 months. I'm struggling through Two Noble Kinsmen, and I haven't read H8th.

But the question became, who else could I read through. I thought of Dickens, Balzac and Falkner. Today I was thinking about Dostoevsky. 

Flannery O'Connor probably wouldn't take a year. Here is some output:

Novels
Wise Blood (1952)
The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

Short Stories
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
The Complete Stories (1971)

Other works
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1961)
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979)
The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983)

There's a review of documentary in the NY Times today about her.

That led me to her latest biography. "Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day."

I could even include a trip to her childhood home in Georgia and then her rural home.

Here is another article on the documentary, slightly more positive.


So that could be fun. Earlier I thought of Dostoevsky. I've been to one of his homes in St. Petersburg when it was called Leningrad. I've read his big hits, but here's a list of his longer works:

(1846) Poor Folk (novella)
(1846) The Double (novella)
(1847) The Landlady (novella)
(1849) Netochka Nezvanova (unfinished)
(1859) Uncle's Dream (novella)
(1859) The Village of Stepanchikovo
(1861) Humiliated and Insulted
(1862) The House of the Dead
(1864) Notes from Underground (novella)
(1866) Crime and Punishment
(1867) The Gambler (novella)
(1869) The Idiot
(1870) The Eternal Husband (novella)
(1872) Demons (also titled: The Possessed, The Devils)[177]
(1875) The Adolescent
(1880) The Brothers Karamazov

A short story collection would not be amis, and maybe a biography. 

Maybe I could do O'Connor, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, Falkner, Beckett and Virginia Woolf over the next decade. And the not Shakespeare Elizabethans. And Terry Pratchett. Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Pyncheon. James. Yeates. Alice In Wonderland, Fitzgerald.

Reread: The Song of Achilles, Hobbit, Elizabeth Bishop.
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