Category: Chapter-a-Day Read-Along
As the bells of Notre Dame cathedral begin to echo and fade away, we get ready to close the book on the story of Quasimodo and Esmerelda and pull the next Chapter-a-Day Read-along book off the shelf, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I have read several Dickens novels, and of them all I have the warmest feelings toward David Copperfield. But it has been almost twenty years since I last read it, and I have forgotten most of the story. I have carried these fond feelings with me...
Today is the final day of reading Quo Vadis, the second book of the 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along. If you were able to adjust to the little schedule mix-up, then today is the day for reading the Epilogue and finishing the story of Vinicius and Ligia. This post is the place for you to leave your thoughts about your experience in reading Henryk Sienkiewicz’s classic. What did you gain from reading it? What challenged you? What uplifted you? What surprised you? I’ve read Quo Vadis a few times already,...
We’re only three days away from beginning Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the next book in this year’s chapter-a-day read-along. Published in French in 1831 and English in 1833, it was originally titled Notre Dame de Paris, referring to the great Notre Dame cathedral. Reading it this year is my tribute to the cathedral, which suffered a devastating fire in April of 2019. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I own an old paperback of the novel that I purchased new about thirty years ago that...
For those of you who are reading Quo Vadis as part of the 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along, there is an important revision to the schedule. The original schedule was based on the freely available translation by Jeremiah Curtin which has 73 chapters and an epilogue. If you are reading Curtin’s translation then you have nothing to worry about. But if you are reading the translation by W. S. Kuniczak that I recommended, the original schedule will not work for you. Kuniczak broke the longer chapters into smaller segments, so...
Today we have reached the final chapter of The Divine Comedy, the first book of the 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along. For the past 100 days we have accompanied Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and it has been quite the journey. I have to admit that this was one of the most challenging chapter-a-day read-alongs for me. There is so much depth to Dante’s poetry and there were so many footnotes that I feel I just scratched the surface of the poem. A daily read-along is probably not the...
Tomorrow, April 10, is the one hundredth day of 2021, the day we finish The Divine Comedy in this year’s chapter-a-day read-along. I’ll post a wrap-up of The Divine Comedy tomorrow, but today we look ahead to our next book, Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. I have been looking forward to reading Quo Vadis ever since I began planning this year’s read-along. I’ve read it a few times before and even taught it to junior high students, but I am especially excited to read this newer translation by W. S....
We’re on day thirty-four of the 2021 Chapter-a-day Read-along, which means we’ve finally reached the end of Inferno and made our way out of Hell. Tomorrow we begin part two of The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio. This post gives you an opportunity to share your thoughts, quotes, and questions about Inferno. Some Quotes from the Past Week “My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shining world again…And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.” –...
I’m a few days late with this post, but it’s week three of the 2021 Chapter-a-day Read-along, and we’re twenty-four cantos, or chapters, into Inferno, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. We’ve only got ten more days in Hell, after which we will accompany Dante into Purgatory. This post gives you an opportunity to share your thoughts, quotes, and questions about the book up to canto twenty-four. Some Quotes from the Past Week “The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and...
It’s week two of the 2021 Chapter-a-day Read-along, and we’re over a third of the way through Inferno, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. This post gives you an opportunity to share your thoughts, quotes, and questions about the book up to canto thirteen. Some Quotes from the Past Week “Men of sound intellect and probity, weigh with good understanding what lies hidden behind the veil of my strange allegory!” Inferno, Canto IX (Ciardi) “…the aim of malice is to injure others whether by fraud or...
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be weekly updates for the 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along. The plan is to make a very brief post each Wednesday to give readers a place to post their thoughts, questions, or reactions to the chapters read in the past week. If you’ve read ahead or if you know the story, please refrain from any spoilers. Each week I hope to post some quotes that stood out to me along with a footnote or two that might be helpful. I may...
Congratulations on reading War and Peace, one of the great works of world literature! Whether you finished it early, on time, or not yet, thank you for participating. I hope the read-along was as enriching for you as it was for me. (If you liked the experience of reading classic literature in one chapter a day, please consider joining the 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along.) I guess the read-along is technically not over, since the schedule calls for reading one final Tolstoy short story tomorrow, “How Much Land Does a...
The 2021 Chapter-a-Day Read-along begins in a few days and it’s time to get ready for our first book! If you’ve been part of our read-alongs the last few years, you know that we’ve already read some of the greatest novels of all time — works like War and Peace, Don Quixote, and The Count of Monte Cristo. But our first book of 2021 has been called “The Greatest Single Work of Western Literature.” I speak, of course, of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Dante’s masterpiece has had...
