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The Reading Hour

The Reading Hour

by Andrew Osborn

Season 3

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book II, chs. 7-11 & two poems by Marianne Moore

Episode 43 begins with a warning about ch. 7 of Book II, in which the fictive narrator Jim Burden describes a "negro" entertainer in language that listeners may find prejudicially pejorative. (Those who wish to skip the chapter may scroll ahead to minute 21:00.) Much of today's reading from My Ántonia concerns how the arrival of a dancing tent in Black Hawk brought about Tony's departure from the Harlings. The episode concludes with two more poems by Marianne Moore: "Poetry" and "The Past is the Present."

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book II, chs. 1-6

Episode 42 introduces the second of My Ántonia's five books, which begins a couple of years after Book I left off. First Jim then Ántonia move to Black Hawk and adjust to life in town.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book I, chs. 15-19

Episode 41 concludes the first of My Ántonia's five books with Jim's account of his and the Shimerdas' first year in Nebraska. Even as spring and summer return, a chill settles over the former friendship between those on the Burdens' farm and the Bohemian family, but Grandfather Burden effects a reconciliation.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book I, chs. 10-14 & two poems by Marianne Moore

Episode 40 continues with five chapters from Book 1 of My Ántonia in which Jim Burden describes his first Christmas in Nebraska, a blizzard, and a death in the Shimerda family. The hour ends with two poems by the modernist America poet Marianne Moore: "Critics and Connoisseurs" and "A Grave."

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Book I, chs. 5-9

Episode 39 offers our second reading from Cather's 1918 novel, My Ántonia, in which Jim and "Tony" visit Russian Peter and Pavel, encounter an enormous rattlesnake, hear a harrowing tale of wolves at a winter wedding, and continue to befriend each other.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia, "Introduction" & Book I, chs. 1-4

Episode 38, the first of The Reading Hour's third season, begins the American novelist Willa Cather's fourth book of plainspoken narrative fiction, My Ántonia (1918), which seeks to depict the spark and tenacity of a Bohemian who has come with her family to farm in Nebraska as she matures from girlhood into womanhood.

Season 2

H. D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, "The Allegash and East Branch," §10; Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"

Episode 37 concludes Thoreau's The Maine Woods with the final three days of the journey south and east along the East Branch of the Penobscot. An excerpt from the Appendix about how to outfit oneself for such an excursion is included. We finish out the hour with a reading of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

H. D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, "The Allegash and East Branch," §9

In Episode 36, Thoreau loses track of his companion as night sets along the Webster Brook, a cow-moose is shot and skinned, and the party heads south and east on the Grand Lake Matagamon to the East Branch of the Penobscot, eating handfuls of blueberries and raspberries at each carry.

H. D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, "The Allegash and East Branch," §8

Episode 35 is only the second of season 2's episodes not to include a reading from Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor, which concluded in Episode 34; the full hour is devoted to "The Allegash and East Branch," in which Thoreau and his companions begin to return from their north-most excursion, making their way toward then along the headwaters of the Penobscot River's east branch.

Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor, ch. 20; H. D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods, "The Allegash and East Branch," §7

Because we conclude A Country Doctor therein, Episode 34 begins with Jewett then rounds out the hour with additional pages from the third essay of The Maine Woods, in which Thoreau enters Apmoojenegamook (the largest of the Allegash lakes) and then the Allegash River itself, heading north.

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