My Antonia
Willa Cather's My Ántonia, a candidate for the next time I teach American Literature 1915-present, is a book I've been worrying away at for a month now. Not because I didn't like it, but because it's a contemplative read, and I've rarely had a contemplative hour these last weeks.
I have to admit that I just haven't read enough Willa Cather. I dearly love some of her short stories, especially "Paul's Case," which I read as a teen (and have taught). But until my wife made me put Death Comes for the Archbishop on my list, just a few years back, I had never gotten around to the novels; though I always intended to. I taught Archbishop the last time, but found that too many of the students found its plot-deficient style difficult to follow. (Not to mention that the great distances traveled by the characters annoyed the kids who've lived in the more compact Northeast.) So I'm in the market for a different Cather. (Which gives me an excuse to read a couple of them. Ah, the uses of college instruction.)
This one is famous, and it should be. An interesting historical novel, an interesting novel of place (rural Nebraska, both on the farm and in a town), an interesting study of characters, with a coming-of-age element. It's told as a memoir, though, which means less plot than the students crave. Hmm.
It's good writing, though, and I particularly like that it isn't a straightforward morality tale. Repeatedly, human psychology undermines the morality tale you're expecting; and so does raw chance.
This one will stick with me a long while.
CBsIP: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Ernest Bramah
Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
The Successful Novelist, David Morrell
Zoo City, Lauren Beukes
a theory of everything, Mary Crockett Hill
Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. I, P. H. Sheridan