What to read?

 What to read?

There are so many things I could follow up on with the Margaret Fuller biography: Goethe, Shelly, Wordsworth, and other romantics. Or the last poets she hung out with before she left for America, and eventually died off the shores of Fire Island: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Or the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Or Waldo Emerson and Thoreau's poetry? Or the anti-Transcendentalist Edgar Allen Poe. Or some of the lesser transcendentalist poets or the Fireside poets? I could totally go off on a huge poetry tangent. 

Or do I read history about the founding of Roman Republic in 1949, and wonder what Fuller's book would have been like?

Or do I read the feminist that come out of the Seneca Falls Women's Rights conference, which she might have headlined in 1850?

I'm probably going to read Nature by Emerson because that's where the group went. The cool thing about reading the Transcendentalists is that everything is available at gutenberg.org.

I've got a biography of the group by Carlos Baker which the group recommends. I read the Cheever book against their recommendation because I got it too late, I was committed to finish it. But it's cool to run things by the hive mind. I'm also grateful to the library because I still prefer old technology books, as opposed to electronic readers. I'm going to be reading Nature on an iPad, but I do have a collected works of Emerson, and 2 copies of Walden, and Dickinson's poems and a biography of her I will make sure to read during this year.

I really liked James Shapiro's Shakespeare in a Divided America. I'm tempted to follow up on the Astor Place Riots.

I'm also reading Goldberg's book on haiku.

I'm also still working on Obama's presidential autobiography.

And a book on grief.

Those are just the most recently read book, I have older ones I've abandoned, and my stack of To Read, and my stack of Reread. And all my other interests! 

I read 2 pages of the Connected Discourse every day, and a Shakespeare sonnet.

The Dickinson group is reading Oliver Twist, which I have a copy close by a hard copy. 

What to do, what to do?

And then I find the Natalie Portman book club!