Author: Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader

To Kill A Mockingbird…Or…I Want to Marry Atticus Finch

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 20 Comments

First, a giant thank you to The Classics Club for inspiring me to read the some of the best books on this earth. There are many new titles on my list of 61. There are also a few that I’ve read before, such as To Kill A Mockingbird. I’m so glad I put this on my list. It is indeed a classic novel and one that I should probably read once a year.

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960 and was an immediate best seller. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. There are over 18 million copies in print and it has been translated into 40 languages. It was also made into an Academy Award winning film starring Gregory Peck.

The characters from this novel have entered our collective lexicon. Who hasn’t heard of Boo Radley? Even if you’ve never read the book you’ve probably heard of the people who populate it. Scout Finch is the narrator and she is the funniest and wisest little girl that ever told a tale. The cast of characters are many and varied and ring true. Scout’s brother Jem, their cook and nanny Calpernia, the neighbor boy Dill, the mysterious Boo Radley and the other assorted community members are all a joy to read about. There are characters that tug at your heart and others that you love to hate. (Bob Ewell, jerk!)

:::Swoon!:::

The best character? The noble, honest, loving, intelligent, fantastic father: Atticus Finch. And I’m not talking about the movie version Atticus, you don’t have to picture the handsome Mr. Peck while reading this to fall head over heels in love with the man. Here is a guy that does the right thing. Even when that right thing is scarier than we can wrap our modern 2012 minds around.

Atticus is a white southern lawyer. He is defending a black man accused of rape. In Alabama. In the 1930s. Yikes, right? That takes gumption and bravery and all around awesomeness.

If you’ve never read To Kill A Mockingbird, you should. If you have, you should read it again.

Notice my new little button on the right sidebar? I’m on a mission against word verification and I got this lovely button from Beatrice Banks.

Facing My Fear…of Poetry!

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 10 Comments
Poetry intimidates me because I don’t understand it. I’ve never really tried to understand it because I’ve been too scared. (Recognize the cycle there?) 
As a lover of literature shouldn’t I already be able to read and discuss poetry? Is that skill something people are born with? Is there a How To Read Poetry for Dummies book? (Ha, there is!)
Neal at English Major vs. the World recently posted about Coursera. It is a company that partners with universities to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. As I was looking through their offerings I saw this class: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

About the Course

In this fast-paced course we will read and encounter and discuss a great range of modern and contemporary U.S. poets working in the “experimental mode,” starting with the 19th-century proto-modernists Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and ending with 21st-century conceptual poetics. Aside from providing a perhaps handy or helpful survey and chronology of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, this course offers a way of understanding general cultural transitions from modernism to postmodernism. Some people may wish to enroll as much to gain an understanding of the modernism/postmodernism problem through a study of poetry as to gain access to the work of these many poets. Participants do not need to have any prior knowledge of poetry or poetics. The instructor, Al Filreis, rarely lectures, and frequently calls for “the end of the lecture as we know it”; instead, most of the video-recorded lessons will consist of collaborative close readings led by Filreis, seminar-style — offering models or samples of readers’ interpretations of these knotty but powerful poems, aided by the poetry-minded denizens of the Kelly Writers House on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

I signed up even though I’m a little bit terrified.

Wish me luck!!

Special thanks to Blue Print Review for also pointing out this class to me, I appreciate it!