Saturday, February 13, 2021

2021 Reading Projects

It's time to undertake some reading projects for 2021.  I think the focus might be poetry.

  • What I have in mind first is tackling Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.  I recall reading at least the first stanza in college – I associate it with Professor Kent Cartwright's course on Medieval and Renaissance literature – but I am quite sure we did not read the whole thing.  If I read one canto per day, it should take 74 days.  (Six books of 12 cantos each, plus the 2 cantos of mutabilities.)
  • I'd like to finish reading "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in middle English.  The poem has 101 stanzas, of which I've read the first 22.  So if I read one stanza per day, we're talking 79 days.
That seems entirely doable!  After that, who knows.  Other targets might include "The Pearl" and "The Dream of the Rood."  I also want to go back to some of Tolkien's poetry, esp. "Light as Leaf on Linden-tree."  And probably Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."