Required Reading: 10 Books We Read For Class That Will Change Your Life
As summer winds down, many students turn with desperation to those lists of required summer reading that they put aside a couple of months ago. But not all assigned reading is dull and unfulfilling, the editors at Huffington Post say:
Sometimes reading books we’re assigned to read, rather than those we would pick up on our own, can be a blessing rather than a curse. It can lead us to unexpected treasures, introduce us to unfamiliar and unexpected points of view, and challenge us in surprising ways.
There are some pretty good books on this list. Look especially at what Maddie Crum has to say about Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud.
More Than a Century Later, Sophia Tolstoy Has Her Say
In her long and often turbulent marriage to Leo Tolstoy, Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy put up with a lot, but “The Kreutzer Sonata” qualified as special punishment. Published in 1889, the story presented Tolstoy’s increasingly radical views on sexual relations and marriage through a frenzied monologue delivered by a narrator who, in a fit of jealousy and disgust, murdered his wife.
According to William Grimes, Sophia wrote in her diary:
“I, too, know in my heart that this story is directed against me, and that it has done me a great wrong, humiliated me in the eyes of the world and destroyed the last vestiges of love between us.”
Sophia wrote two novellas, “Whose Fault?” and “Song Without Words,” that set forth her views on a woman’s experience of love. Those stories lay lost in the archives of the Tolstoy Museum until their recent discovery and publication in Russia.
Grimes writes that “Michael R. Katz, a retired professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at Middlebury College, has translated both stories into English.” Those stories will be included in a volume titled The Kreutzer Sonata Variations that will be published tomorrow by Yale University Press. Grimes calls this book a significant part of “a flurry of recent work appraising Tolstoy’s wife as a figure in her own right.”
In this article Grimes describes the discovery of these works by Tolstoy’s wife and their historical and literary significance.
Alan Gibbons: why YA fiction is crucial for shaping our attitudes to subcultures
Author Alan Gibbons was inspired to write his book Hate after the murder of teenager Sophie Lancaster. Here, Alan shares why he thinks YA books are important for improving our understanding of other people’s identities
Gibbons provides a good look at how reading can help adolescents in discovering and accepting their own identity.
Samuel Beckett’s articulation of unceasing inner speech
undoubtedly the most ubiquitous sound in Beckett’s work is that of the mysterious voices buzzing, murmuring or whispering within the heads of his characters. To borrow from the narrating figure in The Unnamable (1953), the narrative core of Beckett’s dark universes seems to be “all a matter of voices; no other metaphor is appropriate”. The question is: to what extent are voices in Beckett’s fiction just metaphorical presences?
Contrary to all those jokes about people who hear voices, cognitive science has taught us that we all hear inner voices. Young children talk out loud to themselves as they’re playing and as they’re performing actions they’re working to learn, such as tying their shoelaces, in a process called “private speech” or “private talk.” As they grow older they stop speaking out loud, but all of us talk silently and frequently to ourselves.
Here postdoctoral research fellow Marco Bernini points out:
If inner speech is the raw material for hallucinatory phenomena, it is also at the centre of our imaginary engine – supporting our simple need for, as the homonymous text by Beckett portrays, an intimate Company (1980) in the inaccessible dark of our subjectivity.
In the works of Beckett we find yet another example of how literature imitates life.
10 Great Books by Irish Women
Here’s a historical list that includes books published between 1929 and 2010.
