Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Manet and Degas

  Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special.  In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review

The case for Harris

Motley Kamuka Blog endorses Kamala Harris. In general, Trump just wants to lower taxes on the rich, and do nothing, sell whatever influence he can to line his pockets. Apparently the emoluments clause in the constitution has no teeth. Harris has a set of ideas about policy that are fairly middle of the road. In most countries she's would be seen as a centrist. Spin about her radical agendas are exaggerated.  I'm not sure how he got past " grab them by the pussy ", but he did and here we are. Women: Obviously the idea of giving women pregnancy tests at the borders of the state, and then if they come back and don't have a baby, they go to jail, isn't really what most women want. Pick Harris.  I understand if you think abortion is murder, maybe you've been told that by the Catholic church, which has the same ideal of Buddhism that you don't kill--so follow your religion for yourself. Not everyone is Christian or Buddhist or even has a religion. Women are ...

AOC

Dark Brandon meet Dark Alex. I see her advising the republicans to stick to their guns and never compromise. They don’t want to do anything, only obstruct. So they don’t actually need to be unified. Chaos isn’t organized. This is fine. Read all about it from Heather Cox Richardson , a historian who covers current events. "As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base." While we're at it, here's another funny photo from the Onion: And then: I listened to the Times podcast about George Santos . He basically lied about, I don't know, 80% of his resume, and has a mysterious $700k in his "corporation" which has no clients. So he's a Russian or Chinese plant, o...