Category: Comprehensive Exams

Natasha Tretheway, Thrall

Tretheway, Natasha. Thrall. Mariner Books, 2015.

Summary of Work
Natasha Tretheway’s Thrall is a collection of poems that explores what it means to be mixed race, both through her own personal experience of growing up as a half-black woman and the documented experiences of others through various mediums. She largely looks at paintings: the pictorial representations of the Miracle of the Black Leg, the myth that white men could be saved from their amputated limbs or illness by taking the left leg of an Ethiopian or black man and grafting it onto the white man’s body; the paintings representing the Book of Castas, the documentation of the different blood permutations of blackness in Spaniard blood in Mexico: mulatto, mestizo, casto, etc, believing that once the blood had mixed, there was no way to stop what they saw as a regression to black primitive natures; the paintings of great artists like Velasquez, who kept a mixed blood slave and finally manumitted him in 1650, training him to be a painter, the man who gave us the Calling of St. Matthew, Pareja. All of the examples she brings forward cause us to question why not only the painters painted people of mixed race that way, but how they could participate in the creation of life and yet be so disdainful of it or clinical in the way they looked at it.

She describes the clinical surgical experimentation on black women as the white doctors determined what the female body’s ideal was and what its makeup was. She describes the way, in an anonymous painter’s work, the painter within the portrait is horribly mischaracterizing the black woman who seems to be his wife. She describes the children of those mixed race unions, having her readers question what those children’s lives would have been, how the white men represented in the paintings can be so possessive and yet so dismissive of the things they love. Similarly, she goes through these same questions and experiences in her own life, as she tells us of her mother’s struggles of having people give her money in grocery stores when they found out a child, who they originally thought she was maid to, was actually her half-white daughter. She tells us of her struggles to love her father, who left and marginalized her mother until her death, who would always insist that Jefferson could not have fathered children by a slave woman, because he was so against slavery. The collected work takes plenty of time to describe the conflict and turmoil within mixed-race individuals who have to deal with not only the derision and questioning from the outside world, but with the conflict within their own families as they learn what it means to be mixed race, and to have a mixed-race family member.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The main theme within the work is what it means to be from two different races. There are also themes, however, of objectification, slavery, and possession along with white colonialism and how words on a page, documenting the official narrative, also obscure the narrative, and those obscured stories are told in the white space of the pages. The book also calls for people to recognize that the past is inextricably tied to the present for those people who are mixed race and are dealing with both the history and the racism in the present day, even from their own parents.

by bluesyjune

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. Del Rey, 1991.

Summary of Work
Fahrenheit 451 starts with Guy Montag coming home from work and meeting a girl, Clarisse, who is odd. She looks at people, she asks questions about the people she meets, and makes actual conversation about her surroundings and others’ lives as well as her own. It is so strange to Montag, but as he gets used to it, he looks forward to the conversation. When he comes to his house and in his bedroom, however, he finds his wife overdosed on sleeping pills, which means he has to call the emergency services to have her stomach pumped and blood cleaned. She doesn’t remember it the next morning, or at least pretends not to remember.

Guy Montag is a fireman, a man who burns books when they are found in people’s homes. Reading books is forbidden, and the firemen are in place to make sure that the books are burned, and sometimes the people with them. This happens on a job, where the woman with the books actually sets herself, and her books, afire. Montag saves a book from the pyre and sneaks it home. He is sick with the image of the burning woman. He later learns that his friend Clarisse was hit by a car and killed. It further destroys him. He misses work the next day, and his boss shows up to talk to him. After his boss explains the history of the firemen and why books are banned (the minorities and other people didn’t like that it caused people to disagree and argue about things that were best left to other, governmental figures), he tells Montag he knows that he’s taken a book, which happens sometimes, but that the goal is to look through it and then burn it if Montag values his job and life. So Montag reveals to his wife, who is a TV obsessed woman interested in spending all her time staring at the three TV screen walls on the parlor room walls, that he’s been stealing books over the last year and has twenty of them. He forces her to read them with him, and then realizes that he knows someone, a professor he met in the park, who will know what to do with the Bible, the book he stole from the woman’s home collection. He goes to Professor Faber, and they talk about the downfall of intellectuals and how many of them are living in hiding on the railroad tracks in the country.

Montag comes up with a plan to bring the system down, but fails because he gets angry at his wife’s friends and reads them poetry aloud. His wife and the women call the firemen on him. Of course, he doesn’t realize this, and goes to work, where he is forced to go back to his house and burn it with all the books in it. Afterward, when Beatty tries to take him to jail, Montag burns Beatty alive and then fights off the mechanical hound that tries to subdue him with injected chemicals. He escapes to the country right before the war officially starts, and as he is spending time with intellectuals in the country and they tell him that they have memorized books, all of them, and so they can recite the great works from history to people when they’re ready for literature again, the city of Chicago is bombed to the ground, leaving no survivors. The intellectuals talk about how now may be the time to help, and they head toward spaces they think may contain survivors. The big idea they want to drive home in themselves, though, is that they are not more important than anyone else because they contain that knowledge. They are simply knowledge receptacles, and the knowledge is important so that it can be shared with others.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The big themes of this novel are about how we deal with knowledge, particularly written knowledge, and what it does for people. There is also a theme about how technology changes information and often destroys its beauty and meaning in an attempt to make it more bite-sized and digestible. The dangers of having knowledge is also a big theme in the novel: what happens when we don’t do anything with the knowledge we have, act in the wrong way, or consider ourselves better than others because we have the knowledge? The work makes us consider the power of the written word and helps us to understand the different ways technology changes the way we transmit knowledge and consume knowledge, and ultimately, how people are the ones who decide how that technology changes culture, not the technology itself.

by bluesyjune

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. 1955. Beacon P, 1957.

Summary of Work
Baldwin’s memoirs detail what it means to be black in America, and outside of it, and how black people form their identities, particularly how American black people form their identities in a space that has denied them access to their past. Further, he discusses how black-white relations work in America, and how they are based off of a mythos that is largely theological: blackness is associated with the devil or evil in Christianity, and the Christian image of goodness is all clothed in white; we know if a person is good and has made it to heaven if they are robed in white upon their appearance in our vision. In a theology of whiteness, black people are forced to either find a different identity, or far more likely and as we see has happened, forced to believe that they are sub-human or non-human because of their blackness, and they accept that role, even if unwillingly, in American white society. This identity and struggle to be recognized as a human being is documented in American protest literature such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Baldwin asserts is a terrible novel inasmuch as it should be a pamphlet for the type of material it uses, and that Gone With the Wind and other such novels capitalize on this idea of the beauties and tragedies of slave labor—all of which surround black bodies and their identities, which have mostly and largely been forced upon them as objects to be pitied, liberated by well-meaning white people. Of course, this liberation is good, but it still does not rid white people of their understanding that black people are somehow subhuman or lower than they are.

This mythology, woven throughout the American history books and fiction works, extends into film and other mediums of artistic representation, indicative of the underpinning moral beliefs of American society regarding race relations. We can see this in Richard Wright’s famous work Native Son, which gives people a picture of black rage because of this lack of identity, certainly, but also gives us the expected social redemption of Bigger Thomas, something that in Baldwin’s view, robs the novel of much of its power, regardless of its successes. And when all of this history and culture and moral belief is brought by black people over to France and other parts of Europe, they try to deny the identity, because it is just as uncomfortable in Europe as in America. But in Europe, they feel for a time they can escape it. The outright racism and hatred of black people is missing in Europe. However, they quickly come to understand that the derision they experience in America exists in Europe, just in different places, and that they cannot escape their identity as black Americans. The space itself requires them to recognize their unique situation: they are free from the outright racism of Jim Crow, but they cannot identify with the cultures of Europe, and Europeans simply have no understanding of what it means to be black in America or to have experienced that type of race relation. The uniqueness of American life is that black and white races are tied together to learn how to live with each other, and regardless of the white supremacy and the racism, that learning to live with each other, however rife with turmoil, is unique to the whole of the world. Other white countries colonized and left black people in their own country; America brought them in. Knowing that the identity of America, both black and white, rests on this identity and history, should be a step to recognizing a path forward, and to recognizing that the ideal of no racism is simply a dream, but not one that should be discarded.

Brief Note on Themes
The themes of racism, racial identity, and white-black relations run throughout this work. Understanding the mythologies and morals that created racial identity in America is also a huge theme, even when Baldwin is discussing his time in France and Switzerland. Coming to understand what it means to be black in America, and outside of it as a black American, is central to Baldwin’s memoir.

by bluesyjune

C.D. Wright, One Big Self

Wright, C.D. One Big Self. Copper Canyon P., 2007.

Summary of Work
C.D. Wright’s “One Big Self” explores the lives of people in three different prisons in Louisiana. Wright suggests that when we look at all the prisons in America—and the prison population, which is the largest in the world—we are looking in a mirror at America’s values and legacy. What makes up the prison population outside of the numbers and the listed crime or law broken? Invited by her colleague and friend to go to learn about the inmates while her friend is taking pictures of the prison inmates for a larger project, Wright sets out to learn about the inmates and their lives, both before prison, during their crimes and trials, and life in prison. She also contemplates what prisons do to the environments and communities they inhabit. She shows that these inmates are more than just numbers, they are people who have dealt with many difficult circumstances: poverty, difficult family situations, poor education and no job opportunities available, relationship woes, and more.

One of the main things I noticed highlighted was the difference in experience for men and women in prison. There was a large focus on women in context of their children, children they have before they go to prison, children they have while in prison, and what happens to their relationships with their children; there is even a poem describing the process of getting ready for an Easter party with the children in the main area of the prison. With the men, the focus is much more on their experiences in prison or getting to prison rather than on families. When children are mentioned, it is in context of the ages that they meet and where the children end up, usually in prison like their fathers.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The overarching theme of the work is incarceration; how does the American prison system function? Who are the people in the system? Since the makeup of the majority of the population is black males and black people overall, what does that say about who we incarcerate or crime? How does the prison system affect the communities in which they are built? How does it save or ruin city economies? What are the reasons people invest in such systems, especially private prison systems, and how does having prison on the stock market change the system as people view it, use it, and strive for its expansion and continuation? Wright’s work largely reflects upon what it means to look at people solely for their crimes when they are much more than that, and what that says about the American justice and incarceration system.

 

Brief Note on Poetic Structure
Written in a free form, the work is a mix of what would seem like prose, followed by poetry that utilizes caesura, line breaks, and plenty of white space to cue readers to changes in scene, narrator, situation, and discussion. The structure takes a minimalist attitude, where the situations are given in pieces rather than as one continuous narrative. The breaks in narrative and the mix of prisoners names, only ever briefly mentioned, give a sense of “everyman” for the prisoners, rendering both their invisibility and individuality clear to the reader. Certain phrases or poetic repetitive structures, such as the “Count the . . .” poems which are brought back within other poems, work to remind readers of the controlling situation in which the prisoners live.

by bluesyjune

Reading List: Genre, The Novel

  1. Don Quixote 1605                                                             Miguel Cervantes
  2. Robinson Crusoe 1719                                                      Daniel Defoe
  3. Pride and Prejudice 1813                                                 Jane Austen
  4. Frankenstein 1818                                                            Mary Shelley
  5. The Scarlet Letter 1850                                                    Nathaniel Hawthorne
  6. Benito Cereno 1855                                                           Herman Melville
  7. Anna Karenina 1877                                                         Leo Tolstoy
  8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884                   Mark Twain
  9. The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890                                    Oscar Wilde
  10. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 1916                James Joyce
  11. The Great Gatsby 1925                                                     F. Scott Fitzgerald
  12. To the Lighthouse 1927                                                   Virginia Woolf
  13. The Sound and The Fury 1929                                       William Faulkner
  14. Absalom, Absalom! 1936                                                William Faulkner
  15. Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937                            Zora Neale Hurston
  16. Native Son 1940                                                                Richard Wright
  17. Invisible Man 1952                                                           Ralph Ellison
  18. The Lost Steps 1953                                                          Alejo Carpentier
  19. Go Tell It On The Mountain 1953                                    James Baldwin
  20. Things Fall Apart 1958                                                     Chinua Achebe
  21. The Man in High Castle 1962                                          Philip K. Dick
  22. One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967                             Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  23. Sula 1973                                                                            Toni Morrison
  24. Song of Solomon 1977                                                      Toni Morrison
  25. Wild Seed 1980                                                                  Octavia Butler
  26. The Terrible Twos 1982                                                    Ishmael Reed
  27. The Things They Carried 1990                                        Tim O’Brien
  28. Bailey’s Cafe 1992                                                              Gloria Naylor
  29. White Teeth 1999/2000                                                     Zadie Smith
  30. Austerlitz 2001                                                                   W.G. Sebald
  31. American Gods 2001                                                         Neil Gaiman
  32. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2007                Junot Diaz
  33. The Sympathizer 2015                                                       Viet Thanh Nguyen
  34. The Underground Railroad 2016                                     Colson Whitehead
  35. Future Home of the Living God: A Novel 2017              Louise Eldrich

 

 

Criticism and Theory

 

  1. The Rise of the Novel 1957                                                                   Ian Watt
  2. “An Image of Africa” 1977                                                                   Chinua Achebe
  3. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition 1987                            Bernard W. Bell
  4. Playing in the Dark 1992                                                                      Toni Morrison
  5. The Black Atlantic 1995                                                                       Paul Gilroy
  6. History and Memory in the Two Souths 1999                                  Deborah N. Cohn
  7. The World Republic of Letters 2004                                                   Pascale Casanova
  8. Selections from The Novel: An Alternative History 2013              Steven Moore
    Chapter 4: The English Novel
    Chapter 5: The American Novel
  9. Quixote: The Novel and the World 2015                                             Ilan Stavans
by bluesyjune

Reading List: Dissertation Topic—Performance in 20th Century AfAm Literature and Culture

Fiction

  1. Jazz                                                             Toni Morrison
  2. Love                                                            Toni Morrison
  3. Damballah                                                 John Edgar Wideman
  4. Sent for You Yesterday                             John Edgar Wideman
  5. Hiding Place                                              John Edgar Wideman
  6. Praisesong for the Widow                      Paule Marshall
  7. Mama Day                                                 Gloria Naylor
  8. Corregidora                                               Gayl Jones

 

Repeated from 20th Century American Literature List:

The Color Purple                                                 Alice Walker

Their Eyes Were Watching God                        Zora Neale Hurston

Invisible Man                                                       Ralph Ellison

Go Tell It On The Mountain                                James Baldwin

Sula                                                                         Toni Morrison

 

 

 

Nonfiction

  1. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes  Maya Angelou

Repeated from 20th Century American Literature List:

The Big Sea                                                               Langston Hughes

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings                        Maya Angelou

The Souls of Black Folk                                           W.E.B. Du Bois

Between the World and Me                                    Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

 

 

 

Drama

  1. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone                     August Wilson
  2. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom                         August Wilson
  3. The Piano Lesson                                         August Wilson
  4. Blues for Mister Charlie                              James Baldwin

 

Repeated from 20th Century American Literature List:

A Raisin In The Sun                                               Lorraine Hansbury

 

Poetry

1. Jazz Poems                                                             Ed. Kevin Young
(Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

2. Blues Poems                                                            Ed. Kevin Young
(Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

 

 

Critical Works

  1. Jazz Dance                                                          Jean and Marshall Stearns
  2. Steppin’ On The Blues                                       Jacqui Malone
  3. Modern Dance, Negro Dance                          Susan Manning
  4. Reading Dancing                                               Susan Leigh Foster

 

  1. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920

Linda J. Tomko

 

  1. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement

Andrew Hewitt

 

  1. Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play             Jennifer DeVere Brody

 

  1. Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance

Stephanie Leigh Batiste

 

  1. “A Race for Theory”                         Barbara Christian

 

  1. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture                            

    Katrina Hazzard-Gordon

 

  1. Black Dance: From 1619 to Today                           Lynne Fauley Emery
  2. The Black Dancing Body From Coon to Cool         Brenda Dixon Gottschild

 

  1. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910

     Daphne Brooks

 

  1. Black Dance in America: A History Through its People       James Haskins
  2. Blues People: Negro Music in White America                        LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
  3. Black Looks: Race and Representation                                    bell hooks
  4. Black Skin, White Masks                                                            Frantz Fanon

 

  1. Selections from Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Studies in Dance History) Thomas F. Defrantz

Chs 2 – 7

 

  1. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins

David F. Garcia

 

  1. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”                                         Langston Hughes
  2. Stomping the Blues                                                                                      Albert Murray
  3. Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature     Steven Tracy
  4. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature                                      Houston Baker
  5. Shadow and Act                                                                                            Ralph Ellison
  6. Black Resonance:Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature Emily Lordi
  7. Black Performance Theory                         ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz & Anita Gonzalez
by bluesyjune

Reading List: 20th Century American Literature

Fiction

  1. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 1912            James Weldon Johnson
  2. Winesburg Ohio 1919                                                 Sherwood Anderson
  3. The Great Gatsby 1925                                                Scott Fitzgerald
  4. The Sound and the Fury 1929                                    William Faulkner
  5. Passing 1929                                                                 Nella Larsen
  6. Mules and Men 1935                                                    Zora Neale Hurston
  7. Absalom, Absalom! 1936                                            William Faulkner
  8. Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937                        Zora Neale Hurston
  9. Of Mice and Men 1937                                                 John Steinbeck
  10. The 42nd Parallel 1938                                                John Dos Passos
  11. Native Son 1940                                                            Richard Wright
  12. Invisible Man 1952                                                       Ralph Ellison
  13. Fahrenheit 451 1953                                                     Ray Bradbury
  14. Go Tell It On The Mountain 1953                                James Baldwin
  15. The Lost Steps 1953                                                       Alejo Carpentier                       
  16. The Man in High Castle 1962                                       Phillip K. Dick
  17. One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967                          Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  18. Sula 1973                                                                         Toni Morrison
  19. Song of Solomon 1977                                                   Toni Morrison
  20. Wild Seed 1980                                                               Octavia Butler
  21. The Color Purple 1982                                                   Alice Walker
  22. Deadeye Dick 1982                                                         Kurt Vonnegut
  23. The Terrible Twos 1982                                                 Ishmael Reed
  24. The Things They Carried 1990                                     Tim O’Brien
  25. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2007             Junot Diaz
  26. The Sympathizer 2015                                                   Viet Thanh Nguyen
  27. The Underground Railroad 2016                                 Colson Whitehead
  28. Future Home of the Living God: A Novel 2017          Louise Eldrich

 

 

Poetry

  1. Collected Poetry                                                             Maya Angelou
  2. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes                Langston Hughes
    (Vintage Classics)
  3. One Big Self                                                                     D. Wright
  4. “The Book of the Dead”                                                 Muriel Rukeyser
  5. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”                         S. Eliot
  6. Cane                                                                                   Jean Toomer
  7. Selections from “A”: 1, 2, 3,                                             Louis Zukofsky
    6, 7, 8, 11, 12
  8. “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”              Amiri Baraka
    “Legacy”
  9. Thrall                                                                                  Natasha Tretheway
  10. Citizen                                                                                Claudia Rankine

 

 

NonFiction

  1. The Big Sea                                                            Langston Hughes
  2. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings                    Maya Angelou
  3. The Souls of Black Folk                                       W.E.B. Du Bois
  4. Notes of a Native Son                                           James Baldwin
  5. Silent Spring                                                         Rachel Carson
  6. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test                          Tom Wolfe
  7. The Autobiography of Malcolm X                      Malcolm X
  8. Between the World and Me                                 Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

Drama 

  1. Fences                                                                     August Wilson
  2. The Death of a Salesman                                     Arthur Miller
  3. A Streetcar Named Desire                                   Tennessee Williams
  4. Angels in America                                                 Tony Kushner
  5. A Raisin In The Sun                                               Lorraine Hansbury
  6. Topdog/Underdog                                                  Suzan-Lori Parks

 

Short Stories 

  1. “Hills Like White Elephants”                               Ernest Hemingway
  2. “The Lottery”                                                          Shirley Jackson
  3. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”                            Flannery O’Connor
  4. “Judgement Day”                                                   Flannery O’Connor
  5. “Sonny’s Blues”                                                      James Baldwin
  6. “Everyday Use”                                                      Alice Walker
  7. “A&P”                                                                        John Updike
  8. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Joyce Carol Oates
  9. “Two Kinds”                                                            Amy Tan
  10. “Eyes of Zapata”                                                     Sandra Cisneros
  11. “Barn Burning”                                                      William Faulkner
  12. “Girl”                                                                         Jamaica Kincaid
  13. “How To Tame a Wild Tongue”                          Gloria Anzaldúa

 

Criticism and Theory

  1. Poetry and the Age                                                 Randall Jarrell
  2. The American Novel and Its Tradition               Richard Chase
  3. Selections from A New Literary                          Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
    History of America
    “The problem of the color line”
    “The invention of the blues”
    “‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’”
    “A modernist moment”
    “Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’”
    “Jean Toomer”
    “T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence”
    “The Great Gatsby”
    “John Dos Passos”
    “Arthur Miller”
    “Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!”
    “Jelly Roll Morton speaks”
    “Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit’”
    “Up from invisibility”
    “Tennessee Williams”
    “‘The Birth of the Cool’”
    “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
    “Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker”
    “Toni Morrison”

4. The American Short Story 1900-1945: A Critical History                        Philip Stevick

5. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

6. Selections from Columbia Literary History of the United States           Emory Elliott
Part 4: 1910 – 1945
Part 5: 1945 to the Present

by bluesyjune

Meeting My Goals: Planning, Intention, and Follow-Through

I’ve wanted a PhD since I was eight years old. Eight-year-old me would in fact be disappointed that I am 27 and still in the process of obtaining a PhD, and I should have had those three letters after my name by age 25. But here I am, better late than never. I’m getting to study what I’m interested in, and I enjoy what I get to write about. Part of this journey, which I intend to enjoy as much as possible, is reading the important works in my field to become an expert.

My goal for the next four months will be to prepare to take my comprehensive exams. As I am getting my PhD in English, I will need to take three comprehensive exams: one on a century of literature, one on a genre (e.g. novel, short story, poetry, essay, etc), and one on either a special topic, author, or another century. I’ve chosen for my comprehensive exam lists to cover twentieth century American literature, the novel, and my dissertation topic—performance in twentieth century African American literature and culture.

As soon as I finalize my lists with my advisor, I’ll post my lists here and start reading. In order to be done with reading all the books on my lists (which are quite large) in a timely manner, I’m going to have to plan, and follow up with myself and have some accountability. To build notes for study and to keep myself accountable, I’ll to regularly update this section of my website with brief summaries and talking points for each of the works on my reading lists. And by regularly, that is at least weekly; many weeks it will be updated daily.

If you’re following along, I hope that my brief summaries, talking points, and occasional commentary on the works will encourage you to read some of the works I’ve chosen for my lists and expertise. I’ll organize my entries by list, subject matter, and critical discussion points. As I go, feel free to peruse and engage if you like.

Here’s to the next four months and beyond!

by bluesyjune