Biblio Beau

Friday, April 18, 2014

26.
Title: [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]
Author: Ken Kesey
Genre: Fiction
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: April 4, 2014
Rating

Yes, again.

27.
Title: [Oedipus Rex]
Author: Sophocles
Genre: Drama
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: April 16, 2014
Rating:

28.
Title: [The Island of Doctor Moreau]
Author: H. G. Wells
Genre: Scientific Romance
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: April 17, 2014
Rating: *****

I love this text, both for its ability to hold student interest, and how ripe the text is for various points of analysis. Atwood provides an introduction to our edition that suggests "Ten Ways of Looking At" the novel, including allusions to The Time Machine, "New Woman as Cat Woman," an "Unholy Trinity," and so forth. The suggestions are sound, and provide great questions when conversation lulls. This semester conversation has been strong, and I've focused discussion on questions of humanity versus monstrosity, the lack of sympathy for the protagonist, a contemporary reading versus nineteenth-century popular science, and the question of narrative holes (my favorite). It's proving again to be a strong end to the semester.

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Favorite Quotes

"To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching [...]. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission..." - Oscar Wilde, "Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books'" (qtd. Wright, Built of Books, 317).

"I wish you joy o'th' worm" - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.270.

"The world must be peopled!" - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table ... whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (77).

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

And then there is more Oscar Wilde:

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." - Personal Impressions of America

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - "The Children of the Poets", The Pall Mall Gazette

"There is no sin except stupidity." - The Critic as Artist

"One should always be a little improbable." - "Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young"

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton