The 1900 to 1950 Readathon discussion

To discuss your reading plans for this challenge! Non-fiction, plays, poetry, short stories and anything else that isn't a novel . . .

Katie wrote: "To discuss your reading plans for this challenge! Non-fiction, plays, poetry, short stories and anything else that isn't a novel . . ."

Do novellas count as non-novel?

Currently thinking about reading Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Could be a double dip with prompt 5 if I run short of time.

Wasn't sure what to go with for this one but remembered I have Cane by Jean Toomer (1923) on my Kindle.

From the synopsis: "A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery."

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service would be great, super short. It's the Cremation of Sam McGee and other poems about the Yukon/Alaskan Gold rush published in 1907

I think I'm going to re-read "La casa de Bernarda Alba", a play by Federico García Lorca for this one...

Riccardo wrote: "Katie wrote: "To discuss your reading plans for this challenge! Non-fiction, plays, poetry, short stories and anything else that isn't a novel . . ."

Do novellas count as non-novel?"

Novellas count as non-novels because novellas are longer than a short story and shorter than a novel.

I have two things to read so far and hope to add more. I will read Short Stories by Saki in the Everyman’s Library Edition.

I also want to re-read my Grandfather’s WW1 Journal written in diary form. There is also a photo album he put together. And correspondence in letters and cards to his family while in the war and after the war with others in France. I will try to put all his WW1 things together.

To Bonnie: Wow! To have all that from your grandfather!

I'm thinking of "The Man-Eaters of Tsavo" which I believe is a nonfiction account of a series of lion attacks. I think is was the basis for a movie.

Riccardo wrote: "Katie wrote: "To discuss your reading plans for this challenge! Non-fiction, plays, poetry, short stories and anything else that isn't a novel . . ."

Do novellas count as non-novel?"

Sure, feel free to read a novella :)

Sonia wrote: "Currently thinking about reading Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Could be a double dip with prompt 5 if I run short of time."

This is my favourite short story collection.

I'm thinking I might read Down the Garden Path, Beverley Nichols's account of restoring his garden. I have recently been enjoying some of A.A. Milne's non Winnie the Pooh books, so possibly If I May a collection of his stories for Punch magazine.

This is the perfect excuse for me to read Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own.

I may also read Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology 1915 with Amy Lowell's description/definition of Imagist Poetry and poems by herself, Richard Aldington, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, F.S. Flint, and D.H. Lawrence.

I’m thinking of reading Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” that was written in 1938-1939 but published in english in 1956. Still counts and I’ve been meaning to get to this for some time!

Sonia wrote: "Currently thinking about reading Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. Could be a double dip with prompt 5 if I run short of time."

I loved those stories. I'm going to read Letter From England by Panter-Downes. It's a collection of essays written for the New Yorker in 1939 & 1940.

Is anyone else going to read The Waste Land for poetry?

I'm planning on reading The Portable Dorothy Parker (or at least part of it). While some of the writings in it were written post 1950, the majority of it was written within the readathon's time frame. The first part of it is even titled as the original portable that was arranged in 1944. It contains everything from short stories, to poems, to book reviews, and articles.

Hello. I'm Gelli and these are my list for the 1900 to 1950 readathon this month of May.

4. Read something published 1900-1950 that isn't a novel (such as non-fiction, plays, poetry, short stories, etc)
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)

I think a good pick would also be The Prophet. It's a classic I've always meant to read... :)

Reading Dubliners (1914) which is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce.

Thanks to a recommendation from the Backisted podcast I'm planning to complete this challenge with The Plague and I (1948) by Betty MacDonald

(Nonfiction), Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, (05/11/21)

I finished "Draußen vor der Tür" (The Man Outside) by Wolfgang Borchert, published 1947, a play. ( A collection of short stories is included in the volume, too)
This was a re-read for me, I analysed the play for my high school graduation for over 40 years ago.
The play takes place in Germany a few years after WWII. A young man returns to his home town after three years of captivity in Siberia and discovers that he has no home left. His child was killed in the bombings during the war and his wife has a new partner. Nowbody wants to hear about his devastating experiences as a soldier during the war, which still cause him nightmares. The post-war society has no place for people who cannot forget.
Most of the short stories in this volume, too, are passionate appeals against violence and war.
This is a remarkable, haunting book.

I'm still hoping to get to the "Plague and I" but I've just read Black Boy which is a memoir/autobiography by Richard Wright
I was deeply impressed by his analysis of what it was like to be an African-American child growing up in the (US) South in the first half of the 20th Century.
I didn't his self-portrait sympathetic to start off but it grew on me.

TRP wrote: "I'm still hoping to get to the "Plague and I" but I've just read Black Boy which is a memoir/autobiography by Richard Wright
I was deeply impressed by his analysis of wh..."

I found Richard Wright's Black Boy filled with powerful symbolism and personal, community, and racial pain and angst. However, his Marxist agenda is so prevalent, that I suspect he shaped his memoir around that agenda.

I finished the Steinbeck short story: The Pearl. Steinbeck is a keen observer of human nature, especially when it comes to the complex hopes, dreams, and needs of impoverished and oppressed families.

I finished Prophesying Peace: Diaries, 1944-1945, the second volume of James Lees-Milne's diaries, I do like to dip into these.

I also read Blithe Spirit, my favourite Noël Coward play. (I do miss the theatre).

Just started The Journal of Hélène Berr for this. (1942-1944 - Journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris)

Debbie wrote: "I have a collection of e.e. cummings poetry written and originally published from the 20s into the 60s. I'll be reading from that for this challenge."

Sweet! https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5082...

I read the short story collection "Good evening, Mrs. Craven: The War-Time Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes" for this challenge and really liked most of the stories.

Saturday I read EM Forster's 1909 short dystopian story, “The Machine Stops.” Wow! I find Forster's image of the enervating effects of human reliance on machines to be disturbingly accurate.

Today, I read Ernest Hemingway's 1936 short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The subject and juxtapositions of hot savannah and mountain snows and what is and is not said or accomplished are intriguing. However, I never fully enter into Hemingway's perspectives (in any of his works) because his values are too alien to me.