Summer reading

Heather recently posted this stack of books she read over the summer:

Yay! I got inspired to take a picture of my stack, with some in common because we both took "Reading and Writing Personal History" with Barry Spacks:

All of my books were for summer English and Literature classes; I wouldn't read that much on my own. I got most absorbed in This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, and Kindred by Octavia Butler (I'd already read it in 10th grade, but it was good the second time too).

In other news, the CCS Student Lounge now has a set of this year's New Yorker issues for reading and borrowing but not stealing. We're watching you.

Literature showing up in sneaky places

Genre fiction in literature classes

In our meeting on January 7 we talked a little bit about genre fiction and its relationship to literary fiction, so here are a few related links that people may find interesting:

Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It's Cool To Read — people who blur those boundaries.

Beautiful Sci-Fi covers — about an experiment in non-cheesy covers for science fiction books.

Thoughts on Genre — a quote from Joyce Carol Oates on "a tacit contract between [genre readers] and the writer."

Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction — slightly more formal than the above posts.

Literature classes on Facebook

In our meeting today I talked about my dad's Facebook groups for the classes he's teaching at USC in American Studies (he's an English professor):

ARLT101.Spring2009, "Los Angeles: The Fiction"

AMST301.Spring2009, "America, the Frontier, and the New West"

Check out the "discussions" for his lecture notes. They're kind of silly but good, including lecture notes and a "YouTube Bibliography". He's told me that his students like to check Facebook during his classes anyway, so why not put the class there as well?

There's one UCSB English class that I know of with a Facebook page: ENGL 122NW: Narratives of War.

Literature links

You always need more to read, right? Yes, yes, of course you do.

Genres: Alternative, non-cheesy covers for science fiction books — "to reach out to a new audience who wouldn't dream of picking up the standard sci-fi book."

Poetry: The story of a controversial minimalist poem from 1965: "lighght" — Congress got annoyed at paying $750 for one word, but it "still manages to make people think."

Fiction: "Smitty", a short story by Jacob Berman about some guys, a girl, and a boat — published in Spectrum and written by one of my favorite professors.

Criticism: Is Harry Potter just about wealth and connections? — "Harry rarely puts hard work or effort into anything...Hogwarts is nothing more than a magical Mensa meeting."

Learning: Kurt Vonnegut on the silliness of writer's conferences — "Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better."

Comedy: Anton Chekhov spoke at Barnes & Noble and signed books — Improv Everywhere is great.

Pedantry: Why not to decapitalize E. E. Cummings — "we hope the dismal lowercase custom will disappear from the face of the earth," from 1992.

Our patron saint: Dylan Thomas had a messy little writing shed that he painted blue — "...then from two til seven he would retire to the shed to write, think or sleep off the beer."

Book review by Stacie

Shirley Jackson is perhaps better known for her short story "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House (made into an astonishingly bad movie in 1999). We Have Always Lived in the Castle was her final novel and I find something so alluring about being drawn into the strange world the Blackwoods. On the outskirts of a small New England town Mary lives with her older sister Constance and bedridden uncle in a sprawling mansion estate. The opening gives a good sense for the distinct, haunting calmness of the narrator's voice:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Turning through the story, you slowly learn how the other members of the family died and watch as the tension between the small town and the isolated Blackwood estate grows. Look for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition to see Thomas Otts' fittingly eerie black and white cover art.