Announcement: Transcendentalist Read-Along Coming in November…

L to R: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson

Last night on Twitter, @JillIsReading and @RoofBeamReader were having a conversation about Thoreau’s Walden and how they’d like to read and re-read it, respectively.  I chimed in and told them that Walden is one of my favorites and that I try to read it every Spring, and Jill suggested that we have a read-along.  This sparked further discussion, and we decided that we’d have a Transcendentalist read-along in November.

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The read-along will take place November 15-December 15, and it will be a casual 30-day event.  For more information, please see Jill’s post on her blog, A Room of One’s Own.  There you will find reading suggestions, and links to further resources to aid you in what authors are included in the Transcendentalist philosophy.

Although I just re-read it again this past Spring, I will be going back over Thoreau’s Walden.  I will also be re-reading Emerson’s essays, “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” (and maybe a couple of others), as well as poems by Whitman and Dickinson.  Over the next couple of months, I will put together a full list that I will post once the read-along starts.  If you have reading suggestions for the read-along that you’d like to share with others, you can leave them in the comment section here, or you can head over to Jill’s post and leave them in the comment section there (we’d like to have all suggestions in a central place, so any suggestions you post here will be added–by me–to the suggestions on Jill’s blog).

I’m really looking forward to this since it will include some of my favorite authors and poets.  The read-along is open to anyone who would like to join us, so if you’re interested, check out Jill’s post and start getting your reading lists together.  If you don’t have a blog of your own where you can post your reviews and thoughts during the read-along, don’t worry–there will be a master post started at the beginning of the read-along where you can post your thoughts on what you’re reading in the comment section.

Mark your calendars!  I think we can get some great discussions going with this one.