The Reading Hour

Episode 40 continues with five chapters from Book 1 of My Ántonia in which Jim Burden describes his first Christmas in Nebraska, a blizzard, and a death in the Shimerda family. The hour ends with two poems by the modernist America poet Marianne Moore: "Critics and Connoisseurs" and "A Grave."

Episode 39 offers our second reading from Cather's 1918 novel, My Ántonia, in which Jim and "Tony" visit Russian Peter and Pavel, encounter an enormous rattlesnake, hear a harrowing tale of wolves at a winter wedding, and continue to befriend each other.

Episode 38, the first of The Reading Hour's third season, begins the American novelist Willa Cather's fourth book of plainspoken narrative fiction, My Ántonia (1918), which seeks to depict the spark and tenacity of a Bohemian who has come with her family to farm in Nebraska as she matures from girlhood into womanhood.

Episode 37 concludes Thoreau's The Maine Woods with the final three days of the journey south and east along the East Branch of the Penobscot. An excerpt from the Appendix about how to outfit oneself for such an excursion is included. We finish out the hour with a reading of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

In Episode 36, Thoreau loses track of his companion as night sets along the Webster Brook, a cow-moose is shot and skinned, and the party heads south and east on the Grand Lake Matagamon to the East Branch of the Penobscot, eating handfuls of blueberries and raspberries at each carry.

Episode 35 is only the second of season 2's episodes not to include a reading from Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor, which concluded in Episode 34; the full hour is devoted to "The Allegash and East Branch," in which Thoreau and his companions begin to return from their north-most excursion, making their way toward then along the headwaters of the Penobscot River's east branch.

Because we conclude A Country Doctor therein, Episode 34 begins with Jewett then rounds out the hour with additional pages from the third essay of The Maine Woods, in which Thoreau enters Apmoojenegamook (the largest of the Allegash lakes) and then the Allegash River itself, heading north.

Episode 33 continues with Thoreau and his companion striving to navigate the carry to Mud Pond on foot then catalogues the molesting insects encountered before concluding the day with observations about the loon; the climactic, penultimate chapter of Jewett's A Country Doctor follows.

In Episode 32, Thoreau paddles through narrow waterways and seeks to carry his sixty-pound sack to Mud Pond by a path more swamp-like than muddy; we then conclude the 19th "Friends and Lovers" chapter of Jewett's A Country Doctor, the second half which registers Nan's perspective on her relationship with George Gerry.

Episode 31 continues with Thoreau's third adventure in the Maine woods, during which he interests himself in his Indian guide's sensibilities regarding how to conduct oneself on a Sunday; the episode concludes with the first half of A Country Doctor's 19th chapter, in which the young Dunsport lawyer recognizes ponders the degree to which his affection for Nan is reciprocated.