Literature Discussion Group: January 11th: New Year, New Book

10 December 2012

January 11th: New Year, New Book

At our next meeting, on January 11, 2013, we'll be discussing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Some of you have read this one before, so this will be great opportunity to see what you pick up the second (or third, or fourth) time through that you may have missed during a previous reading.

The story of our eponymous protagonist (how's that for a fun phrase?) weaves itself around ten titles that help to define portions of her life. With that in mind, here's your assignment:

Choose ten titles to represent your life to date. They can be fiction, non-fiction, mass market, self-published, handmade--whatever. Any and all books that have played a role in your life are game.

It will be hard to narrow the field to just ten titles, I'm sure, but try to keep it in that ballpark. And once you have your ten titles, use them to create your Ideal Bookshelf. Check here and here for a few examples--all of which have around twenty titles, I'm noticing, so let's say shoot for ten (for the sake of parity with this month's book) and don't exceed twenty (for the sake of parity with the examples). Somewhere in there I'm sure you'll find the right number.

Bring these Ideal Bookshelf illustrations (which can be done freehand, collage style, or with software, by the way) to our next meeting so we can all share them.

Happy holidays, happy reading, and happy illustrating. See you on the 11th!

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Looking For Hamlet Scholar Talk

This is another event at the PPL in March in honor of the First Folio Exhibit, and it's on Wednesday, March 9th from 12-1:30pm in the Rines Auditorium.

"Focusing on Hamlet, University of Southern Maine Professor Ben Bertram will examine the way editors, directors, actors, teachers, and scholars choose among folio, quarto, or conflated versions of the plays. He will also be accompanied by actors who will perform Hamlet’s soliloquies and join in a discussion of how Shakespeare’s words make it from the page to the stage."

Get the full description here.

Definitions and Clarifications

pneumatic, adj. - literally, full of air. This term is often used to describe women in BNW, and seems to suggest that a woman like Lenina, who's "wonderfully pneumatic," is buxom, curvy, shapely, and yes, even bouncy. But pneumatic could also have a second meaning here, and that is to indicate that someone is a bit of an air-head, light on the intellectual matter, or not bogged down by weighty matters or considerations.

viviparous, adj. - a creature that is viviparous gives birth to live young that develop inside the body, as in the way mammals reproduce. Humans are viviparous (at least, they were until A.F. 632).

Malthusian, adj. - based on the beliefs of Robert Thomas Malthus, a British economist who argued that "population tends to increase faster than food supply, with inevitably disastrous results unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease." - The Free Dictionary

Pavlovian Conditioning, n. - also called Classic Conditioning, it's a way of getting a subject to make certain associations between two previously unrelated things; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the psychologist who discovered that if he always rang a bell right before feeding his dogs, they came to associate the sound of the bell with getting fed, and therefore would start to drool upon hearing the bell. Here's a great comic related to that experiment.

Literature Discussion Group

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10 December 2012

January 11th: New Year, New Book

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