The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe

The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

There is a biography at the start. (Poe lived an interesting life with a morbid death.) There are also essays and dramas included. Poe was not a fan of long poems. He was a great, imaginative writer.

Annabel Lee (1849) - a somewhat morbid love poem, unfortunately read with a robotic voice

The Bells (1848) - the repetition of bells makes this one good

The Raven (1845) - Poe's famous poem. Captures his style well

To Helen (1831) - a poem of beauty with Helen of troy and others

A Dream (1827) - a dream, short and sweet

Alone (1829) - a loner in childhood

Fiaryland (1829) - imagery of a land of fairies

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe

This narrative is Poe's lone novel. It starts as a fairly straightforward travel novel. There are voyages at sea, shipwrecks, mutinies and other similar things. However, this being Poe it does take a turn towards the gruesome. The see a ship that they hope is their savior. The Captain seems to be nodding towards them. However, they later see a bird take a chunk out of him and realize that everyone on the ship is well dead. In a later episode the narrator and his companions are near starvation and turn to cannibalism. They go to an island where they seem to befriend the natives, only to have most of their group killed by them. (The narrator and his companion lucked out in getting separated from the group.) Later they end up in remote areas of the south seas. The book comes to an abrupt ending with perhaps some of the true narrative "missing". This book fits well in the canon of fictional travel books from Gulliver's Travels to Around the World in 80 Days and the Land that Time Forgot. 

Great Classic Stories 2

The ones that stuck out as being good in this collection were
Young Goodman Brown: He wanted to be good, but saw that everyone that he respected was in cohorts with the devil. It also made me wonder what happened to the deep religiousity form early New England. Will the other super religious areas change that way also?
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper: A great Mark Twain humor piece that I had not read before.
A Piece of String : A small thing ends up leading to dire consequences (watch out for strings!)
Head and Shoulders: life intervenes, and roles switch, with the academic's showgirl wife eventually attracting his past intellectual idol.
I didn't like Nuns at Luncheon or Cousin William.

The stories:
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835)
The Cask of Amontillado (Edgar Allan Poe, 1846)
Cousin William (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1855)
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper (Mark Twain, 1870)
A Piece of String (Guy de Maupassant, 1883)
Angela, An Inverted Love Story (W.S. Gilbert, 1890)
Oh! The Public (Anton Chekhov, 1885)
The Nightingale and the Rose (Oscar Wilde, 1888)
The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin, 1894)
A Coward (Edith Wharton, 1899)
A Jury of Her Peers (Susan Glaspell, 1917)
Araby (James Joyce, 1914)
The Mark on the Wall (Virginia Woolf, 1917)
The Interlopers (Saki, 1919)
Head and Shoulders (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920)
The Stranger (Katherine Mansfield, 1921)
The Blind Man (D.H. Lawrence, 1922)
Nuns at Luncheon (Aldous Huxley, 1922)

Great Classic Stories

The problem with listening to short stories is that if you zone out for a bit, you pretty much miss the entire story. Some of the stories were easy to grasp in the time. Others I just glossed right through. I liked The Monkey's Paw, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, the Tell-Tale Heart and Pat Hobby & Orson Welles. As for the others, I either zoned out for a bit and didn't grasp the story, or paid a attention and didn't like it. Maybe I'll need to go back at a later time. Or perhaps I should just focus on the ones that were the most accessible.

The included stories:
Reginald on House Parties - Saki
The Sphinx without a Secret - Oscar Wilde
Tobermory - Saki
On Being Idle - Jerome K Jerome
The Model Millionaire - Oscar Wilde
The Garden of Truth - E. Nesbit
The Cat that Walked by Himself - Rudyard Kipling
The Girl from Arles - Alphonse Daudet
Mr. & Mrs. Dove - Katherine Mansfield
Georgie Porgie - Rudyard Kipling
Caterpillars - E.F. Benton
Lost Hearts - MR James
Ship to Tarshish - John Buchan
The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
The Man of the Night - Edgar Wallace
Dr. Heidegger's Experiment - Nathaniel Hawthorne
B 24 - Arthur Conan Doyle
Pat Hobby & Orson Welles - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mad - Guy de Maupassant
The Black Cat - Edgar Allan Poe
The Monkey's Paw - WW Jacobs

Classics of American Literature

Classics of American Literature surveys American literature, starting with Benjamin Franklin. He spends multiple lectures covering single works and authors. There were a half-dozen lectures covering Emerson and Thoreau. It didn't leave me with any desire to read them again. However, Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving seem to be worth going over again. And Nathaniel Hawthorne and Poe rank high on the list.

There tend to be multiple lectures on each author, making the pace rather slow. Twentieth Century literature seems to be be much more in line with works I remember reading. (Thanks to a great high school English teacher. I took mostly Brit. lit in college, so that wasn't much help here.)

He also mentions the "canon" and how some of the "white men" like Eliot, Fitzgerald and Faulkner are out of favor. It is sad that political correctness has gone so overboard that it seeks out minor figures just because they were not represented. This is a great disservice, especially considering one discussion about the inter-relation of the past and present. History is impacted by how the present sees it. While studying lots of obscure writers from the past may make academics feel good, it doesn't help them to understand the people of that time. Then, people read and studied the big guys of the period. Even if there were high quality writers left by the wayside, studying them would not help us understand history any better. Instead, it leaves us just with literature in the isolation. And if we are focusing on isolated literature, we should pick the highest quality literature regardless of authorship or time period. (Though when people 100 years from now study today, they should pick some of the obscure 200 year old works to understand today better.)

I had recently read Invisible Man, so some of the commentary on it seemed to most relevant. Many of the other books discussed seemed to have good points, but not necessarily books that I would like to read. I guess that makes this long series of lectures a time saver.