Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked. (Sept 30, 1659)

Basically, Crusoe gets stranded on this island for 28 years.  Yeah. 

The English major among us wants you to know that Robinson Crusoe is often credited as being the first real novel (as opposed to epic poems and all that) and that telling straight narrative this way was so revolutionary that it was disguised as a true-life memoir for years.  So there’s your educational component for the month.

How to Commemorate

• Build anything in your yard (or a friend’s yard).
• Address every stranger as “Friday.”
• No bathing.

Works Cited    

Robinson Crusoe

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Mr. Collins arrives at Longbourn (Michaelmas, Sept 29)

On Michaelmas the condescending clergyman Mr. Collins arrives at Longbourn to stay with his relatives the Bennets. Oh, and choose one of them to marry since he is slated to inherit the house when Mr. Bennet dies and marrying would keep the house in the family.  It’s complicated.

How to Commemorate:

• Choose which of your cousins you would marry--and then (because we're not gross) choose one of their neighbors for real!
• Write down some compliments that you could use at a future time to lighten someone’s mood.
• Pick one person you know, and kiss their ass.  Like, a lot of ass.
• Eat a goose.  It’s not really mentioned in the book, but it’s a Michaelmas tradition, I promise!

Works Cited    

Pride and Prejudice (book)

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Pride and Prejudice (movie)(Just the BBC one because it’s the best, obviously.)

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Banned: Call of the Wild

In honor of Banned Books Week, we are repurposing some reflections that one of our team members wrote a few years back.  Though not exactly bringing fiction into the everyday, we think that celebrating banned books is an important way to honor the value of all kinds of books in our lives.  Even--and especially-- if we disagree with them.

Call of the Wild


I’ve been told that I have a special characteristic that makes me able to enjoy American literature. Tolerance. I'm not sure how others get turned off to American writing, and I'm the first to admit that it is not necessarily the best in the world. But for a nation so young, I think we've done alright so far.

To my thinking, Call of the Wild is just about as American as it gets. It's about a dog named Buck who is kidnapped from his home in California, and sent to pull a dog sled in the Klondike gold rush. The setting of the story is very "Manifest Destiny", and the Klondike gold rush was something that author Jack London experienced for himself firsthand. As for the plot, what's more American than an adventure to seek treasure in the unexplored regions of our country? London's book is short, his writing crisp.

And let's not forget the other thing Americans love: dogs. During the course of the story, Buck changes from a simple domesticated dog to something of a wild animal. He increasingly draws on a fierce strength buried somewhere beneath his persona until finally this wildness beckons him away from the human world altogether and back into the life of a wolf. As this prehistoric consciousness arises in Buck, London elicits a similar sort of feeling in the reader. We, like Buck, have an ancient strength underneath our skin, bristling to get out.  As I read the book, I wondered if I, like Buck, have become domesticated over time, and maybe I should tap into that ancestral ferocity.

Of course, London's message that humanity may have lost something crucial to our identity flies in the face of the idea that humanity is gradually improving. Maybe that's why the Nazis burned Call of the Wild in 1933. Getting off the evolutionary track doesn't exactly create a super-race. Instead, Jack London proclaims that we used to be something great, and that greatness is still within us.

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Banned: To Kill a Mockingbird

In honor of Banned Books Week, we are repurposing some reflections that one of our team members wrote a few years back.  Though not exactly bringing fiction into the everyday, we think that celebrating banned books is an important way to honor the value of all kinds of books in our lives.  Even--and especially-- if we disagree with them.

To Kill a Mockingbird


Now here is a book that deserves to be banned. To Kill a Mockingbird has it all--bad language, rape, racial discrimination, violence against children, and the list goes on. When most groups have challenged this book, they cite all these factors, and say that the book promotes them.
Now, I get why parents object to the "profanity and racial slurs" in To Kill a Mockingbird.  I turn the channel on TV at home when language gets harsh and my five-year-old daughter is sitting next to me. I want her to have virtues to aspire to, not vices to hold her back. The real question about depicting discrimination and vulgarity in literature is what affect it has on us or on our children. We don't want the book to stand up these behaviors as exemplars. The N-word is not okay to come out of our mouths, and we want our children to know that.

To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't set that behavior as an example, however. Author Harper Lee merely paints the picture of a small Alabama town as it was in the earlier part of the 20th Century. Lean close now, and I'll whisper you a secret: White people in the South didn't always treat African-American people properly or with respect. Shew. I'm glad I got that off my chest. Don't you feel better too? Hiding the negative potential common to all people doesn't change historical fact, and it doesn't prepare our children for facing these dangers when they arrive.

Readers and especially challengers need to keep in mind that just because a behavior is in print, that behavior isn't necessarily being set forth as a role model. The truth is that we learn a lot about people from choices they make, and we learn more from their bad choices, bad words, and bad behaviors than we do from their good ones.

Racism in To Kill a Mockingbird is not given 'prescriptively'. It's not telling us how things ought to be. Rather, the racial divisions are given 'descriptively', simply telling us how things were at the time. It is a regrettable fact that racism, incest, and violence against children did happen. However, banning the book for discussing these topics is like banning The Killer Angels because its depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg shows our country in a state of division.

To Kill a Mockingbird presents very accessible, likable characters (I'm looking at you Jem, Scout, and Dill) who help readers to explore the depth of humanity that can be encountered, even in the most common life, the life of a child. I think Harper Lee's master stroke, though, is in the last page. As the events of the book wind down, and Atticus tucks Scout into bed, she recounts a story he had been reading to her of a group of boys who set off after someone who had been vandalizing their clubhouse.

"Yeah, an' they all thought it was Stoner's Boy messin' up their clubhouse and throwing ink all over it an'... they chased him 'n' never could catch him... an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice." His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me. "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

Most people are nice when you finally truly see them. That's the book's lasting message; that's why I still read To Kill a Mockingbird. That's why I'll read it with my daughter whether it's allowed in her school or not.

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