10th September, 19.00 UK time. The Annotated Alice. You may want to supplement with some Edward Lear.
21st September, 19.00 UK time. Christine Rossetti. A Birthday. And ‘Goblin Market.’ And anything else you want to read: she’s the top.
22nd October, 19.00 UK time. J.S. Mill, Autobiography. I’ll be writing about Mill and Harriet Taylor, Mill and bildungsroman, and Mill and his family around this session.
UPDATE: 26th November, 19.00 UK time. Darwin. Letters and Origin.
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We haven’t covered nineteenth century America yet, but after this the plan is to move to Shakespeare and English poetry from, roughly, Spenser to Milton. We’ll be pairing As You Like it with Hamlet, Twelfth Night with The Tempest, and Henry IV (I and II) with Anthony and Cleopatra. We’ll also read Donne, Herrick and so on. Probably we’ll work from an anthology. I’ll set out the details closer to the time. Since Shakespeare will be starting in December, Twelfth Night and The Tempest will be our first pairing.
Any thoughts on when the next discussion will be? Also, are we still planning on a discussion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese or are we diving into Shakespeare with Twelfth Night and The Tempest?
I've been reading a lot of Substack authors recently on the topic of note taking. Have you ever posted anything about taking notes, particularly when reading nonfiction? I bought paper copies of our Mill and Darwin selections specifically in order to be able to take notes in the books themselves, but I've never taken notes in a non-classroom setting.