Skip to main content

Huckleberry Finn on Audible

We are beginning our first novel this week and it's one of my absolute favorites, although it certainly isn't without its controversies. Mark Twain wrote one of our first regional texts, and within this text, we certainly get a lot of dialect. This fits with the whole realism movement in literature. Twain writes the way folks might have spoken, and this means his spelling is difficult and can be hard to read. For this reason, I highly recommend using Audible's version, my personal favorite is the reading by Elijah Wood. Yep, you read that right. Frodo reads us Huckleberry Finn, and he does so brilliantly. If you do not use Audible, consider trying it out for a month, just to get this text. You may find that an Audible subscription is as valuable as a cable subscription. I take mine over the latter. Now, I still use my book. I follow along, highlighting and annotating really important passages, symbols, and quotes that I know I want to use in my paper. I also use little sticky post-it tabs that you can easily pick up at Target or Walmart to mark the pages. Sometimes, I use a color-coded system. Green might reference nature; blue might reference class systems; pink could mark gender portrayals, etc. Find a system that works for you. We will be doing literary circles with this text, so remember to go back to that tab at the top of the blog and remind yourself what you're supposed to do for your team. These positions will rotate each week. I'd like us to finish this text over the next 3-4 weeks, so that means we have about ten chapters a week to get through. You can do this, and Audible can help! I believe the entire book is only about 10 hours long. This means if you spend 2 1/2- 3 hours a week, you'll be right on track. That's equivalent to a movie or two, or half of a bodybuilder's daily workout. Or how long my daughter spends on Snapchat each day. ;) Wait, I'm pretty sure you will spend WAY less time on this novel than that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Flannery O'Connor Analysis on "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

               Grace and Theology: A Necessary Discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Heather Chandler             D.H. Lawrence asserts in his Studies in Classic American Literature, that “the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (8). While this approach is helpful and necessary in many works of literature, it is both misleading and damaging to do so with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A popular new way of interpreting her work is to look through a secular lens, but separating her Catholic beliefs and allusions reduces her work to a simplistic ambiguous tale, molded to suit our own postmodern desires; and, this is essentially as misguided as looking at Da Vinci’s Last Supper and refusing to note its religious connotations. Instead, we should look at the larger picture,...

Tiny House Living and Transcendentalism

This week's class will explore transcendentalism, Emerson, and Thoreau. But like most of the topics we've studied so far, we can find modern connections. Transcendentalism was a religious movement that grew out of Romanticism between 1836-1860. We can define it as a spiritual, philosophical, literary movement with ties to the Unitarian Church around Boston. Like Romanticism, this movement emphasized individual rights and inspiration, the latter, especially within nature. Transcendentalists believed that individuals can discover truth for themselves, rather than learning it through tradition. It differs from Romanticism in that it focused on God. Transcendentalists believed that God was everywhere and could be discovered through intuition and that all people have a divine inner light. By accessing this light or intuition, they can transcend the ordinary and experience the spiritual. The five tenets of Transcendentalism: 1. Nonconformity 2. Self-Reliance 3. Importanc...

Welcome to U.S. History and American Literature

Class, I'm glad to have each of you join me for this journey into American history, literature, art, and music. Our goal this year is to gain a broader sense of our American culture, its major events and movements, our greatest artists and musicians, and the influences and shifts that have shaped our nation into what it is today. There is a great deal of information to cover, but I want to emphasize to you that we will not be experts by the end. In fact, learning is a lifelong pursuit. What I hope we can accomplish this year is to lay a healthy foundation, introducing you to the major players and events. We will break history down into units. Those units will have many sub-topics. Your task is to pick a couple of those sub-topics each week and research them more in-depth and prepare yourself for both class discussions and debates. You have some freedom here with your choices. If you are more interested in battles, then you can focus there. If you are more interested in the politica...