August 2021: Flannery O'Connor

Hey all,

This month will be dedicated to works by Flannery O'Connor. What does everyone plan on reading?

I have an edition of her Complete Stories that I was gifted a year or two ago so I should finally get around to reading it!

edited for touchstones

Forgot to mention that there are 3 works by Flannery O'Connor on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list:

Wise Blood
The Violent Bear It Away
Everything That Rises Must Converge

edited to fix touchstones

Not sure I'll read along but O'Connor is an "author of interest" for me so I'll be lurking. Eventually I plan to acquire the LOA edition of her collected works; the few short stories of hers that I've read, I've liked.

I will be reading either Wise Blood or her Complete Stories.

I have read a good bit of O’Connor’s fiction, but never The Violent Bear It Away, one of her two short novels. I plan on definitely reading that and as much as I can of The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters. She had a wide list of correspondents and the letters I’ve read so far give a great sense of Flannery as a person and the wide range of her interests.

I enjoyed reading A Good Man is Hard to Find last year. If I do get around to joining, I might probably like to try Wise Blood.

I have decided on O’Connor’s Complete Stories for August.

I see "A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories" is available now at my library! Just put a hold on it. :)

I love Collected Stories, maybe I'll read it again!

I just finished Wise Blood today! Still gathering my scattered thoughts (and wits!) together.

It sure was somethin', though.

I'm reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find. About three stories in, and I don't always "enjoy" the outcomes, but they're well-crafted.

Edited to get the touchstone to work.

I'll be reading The Violent Bear It Away. I think a southern gothic will fit in the dog days of summer here.

I read A Good Man is Hard to Find several years ago and recommend it highly.

>14 sparemethecensor: I read The Violent Bear It Away a few months ago. I’m interested to see what you think!

Hmm, this writing wasn't for me, unfortunately. I read a couple of the short stories including "A Good Man is Hard to Find." and found a few things to like (mainly the dialogue), but more things that I disliked or found boring, to the point I couldn't motivate myself to read any more of them and returned the book to the library.
I'm not sure I can say more without spoiling it, I tried to search librarything for how to include spoilers in reviews in a way that people can opt to not read them, but the search results were just books with the word spoiler in them! lol.

>16 krissyzzz:

To hide text behind a "spoiler" button, type in {spoiler} SECRET MESSAGE {/spoiler}, but replace the squiggly brackets with the "less than" and "greater than" brackets. (I can't type them directly so that you see them, since typing them out activates the function itself.)

The result should behidden from prying eyes like this.

>17 elenchus: Oh thanks!!! here's my practice try

>17 elenchus:, >18 krissyzzz: The spoiler tag is a thing of wonder! I love using it :)

I've just completed The Violent Bear It Away. I love southern gothic and I loved this. It is such an arresting snapshot of rural southern life in the time period.

Like everything of hers I've read, this has a strong religious overtone. I found the debate among how to raise a child to be religious quite overbearing which I suspect is the point. When this is what life is like -- very nearly a Levianthanesque nasty, brutish and short -- religious matters take on a different sheen. Even for minor characters this is true. I don't think I'll ever forget how O'Connor paints the eleven year old forced into worldwide evangelism by her parents.

Something that caught my eye in this novel which is quite different from others of the genre and time period (at least what I've read) is gender roles. Quite contrary to typical portrayals, this novel has multiple women who are actively disinterested in motherhood, even abandoning their children outright, and multiple men who take on extensive caregiving responsibilities. This is partially out of a sense of religious obligation to raise and baptize the children (baptism being a big topic in this book) but also has an emotional component not often conveyed for male characters in father figure roles at the time. I wonder if others picked up on this or have insights here?

Anyway, long winded way to say, recommended for those who enjoy reading American literature for sure. It's clear why O'Connor has the role she does in the canon for such a short bibliography.

>20 sparemethecensor: Yes, I agree with everything you said here.

The gender roles were interesting. The man, that wanted to raise the boy and get him out of the woods and away from the crazed uncle, he took on “feminine” qualities in his care for the boy. I can’t remember all the characters’ names so I hope I’m making sense.

I was left wondering what O’Connor’s ultimate point was. From what I know about O’Connor, she was religious herself. Yet there isn’t much of a positive light shed on religion in the book.