Men of Letters is a book club. We choose a theme for the year starting in the fall, and read a book every other month until the summer. Below is our 2024–2025 theme, books, and schedule. Contact us for more info.
THE HERO’S JOURNEY
September 20
Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories
November 22
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
January 24
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, selections:
“Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law”
“To Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity”
“Of Cannibals”
“Of Smells”
“Of Prayers”
“Of Practice”
“Of a Monstrous Child”
“Of Experience”
“Dear Men of Letters: I can’t read French! Is there a translation you recommend?” Glad you asked! The translation of Donald Frame is said to be the best. It is available in the edition of his complete essays published by Stanford University Press and in Montaigne’s one-volume complete works published by Everyman's Library. But no particular translation is required. Warren Farha will gladly order (or possibly already stocks) whatever version you want at Eighth Day Books. You can also read a very old seventeenth-century translation online.
March 7
Beowulf
Hwæt!
If you, like us, cannot read Old English, then you, like us, should learn. Time is short, however; so in the meantime, as you brush up on your Anglo-Saxon, we recommend reading Beowulf in translation. Seamus Heaney’s is pretty much the standard and can be procured at Eighth Day Books. (The translation is available via audiobook as well—narrated by Heaney himself on Audible and someone else on Spotify.) But no particular translation is required.
Recommended (but by no means required) background reading: J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was a watershed in (re)habilitating Beowulf’s place in the literary canon and beautifully expostulates on the poem’s reception, rhetoric, composition, and even textual history. Read it beforehand and you will be the ringer in our discussion! It is collected in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, which sadly appears to be out of print but can be got for a reasonable price online.
May 9
Homer, The Odyssey
Speak in me, Muse, of that next meeting of the Men of Letters.
Our next meeting will be held on May 9, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. (location: Reimer household, 629 Stone Creek Dr., Newton), and we will be reading the Odyssey, as we follow the hero's journey back to its wandering, wily origin (maybe) in Odysseus's travels in the Aegean Sea.
If you're not an ancient Greek rhapsode and thus cannot orally recite the tale of the Odyssey from memory, the next best thing is to read it in Homer's Attic Greek. If you can't do that either, then you should settle for an English translation, of which there are many. Scholars argue about translations of Homer the same way they argue about Bible translations: they range from very literal to loose, thought-for-thought correspondence, in both verse and prose. No particular translation is required, and it would be interesting to hear different renderings when we gather. Commonly read recent translations are by Richard Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Emily Wilson, and Daniel Mendelsohn. They say Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century rendition in heroic couplets holds up. It is available to read online.
If you're a real go-getter, here are three secondary sources worth reading once you’re finished: Eva Brann, Homeric Moments; M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus; and Erich Auerbach, "Odysseus' Scar" (a stand-alone essay but also the first chapter of his magisterial book Mimesis).
July 25
Charles Portis, Norwood