Thanks!

Thank you so much! What a wonderful comment!

@@HannahsBooks Among my faves: Good Man, Life You Save, Good Country, Displaced Person, Artificial N, Revelation, and . . . Parker's Back! (That one is not among the standard titles.) I will definitely click on your reading of other titles!

@@geraldstinson881 I have filmed Good Man-and have been thinking about recording GCP and Revelation. Another one I really enjoyed filming was Eudora Welty’s Why I Live at the PO. Most of my channel is made up of chitchat about reading, but I do have a playlist of the story performances. I will look it up for you…

@@geraldstinson881 kzfaq.info/sun/PLqkLQE2gbz-5a2ckqoeflFv4YR8FBe5-3 is the playlist.

You are very kind. Thank you.

Brian, you have pegged it. Both characters are worth liking in a few ways, and both are absolutely horrid in other ways. I have both adored and felt uneasy about F'OC since reading her letters right after college. Her complicated racial statements, her very judgemental religious beliefs, etc.--balanced with her sense of humor and her ability to observe so closely... Hope you are getting sun and lovely temperatures for your walks. It looks like we will be, starting today!

@@HannahsBooks I think if I could just make up my mind about O'Conner, I could go on and enjoy her work with a settled mind as I have with Faulkner. I'm not looking to "cancel" her. She was a great writer and her stories are so powerful. Weather here has been great ever since the freeze.

Thank you so much! I hope you will have a good classroom conversation!

Thank you! I do have another O’Connor story up (A Good Man is Hard to Find) and am going to be filming both a Faulkner story (A Rose for Emily) and another O’C story (Good Country People) during August , I think.

Thank you so much, Marian.

Thank you. That sadness and bitterness and hope at the same time are definitely things that draw me to Flannery O’Connor.

I cried.

Your comment made my day! Thank you.

Thank you so much! I especially love the idea that you're going to read to your grandsons! Another one of my favorite O'Connor stories (which I might eventually try to record) is "Good Country People." I read it to a bunch of highschoolers in a class once--and they were rolling on the floor in laughter!

Thank you! This is where I try to film the short story performances--just so my booktube friends will know this is a different kind of thing.

What a kind comment! Thank you!

Thank you so much!

Thank you! It is a powerful story, although a difficult one to grapple with.

Yes indeed! (Did you notice my purple and green head wrap?)

@@HannahsBooks Indeed, you could have added a couple of peacock feathers for real Flannery O'Connor effect. You have a great reading voice.

@@jimsbooksreadingandstuff Thank you so much!

Thank you!

Thank you so much for motivating me to prepare this one!

Oh gracious. Thank you so much for your compliments-but there are indeed lots of cuts where I lost what I was saying or had a tech issue or whatever. I am thrilled that the cuts were not overwhelming for you. Of my other videos like this, my favorite is Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O. I am hoping to make a recording of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily sometime soon. While I initially wanted to record a particular Alice Walker short story or a Virginia Woolf non-fiction piece, talking like a white southerner has kept me a bit limited...

@@HannahsBooks ok I didn't realize there were cute 😅 still flows really well

Thank you!!

Thank you so much!

Thank you so much! O'Connor is such a fabulous writer. She has meant a lot to me for a very long time.

Thank you so much, Christy! Flannery O'Connor is such an interesting author--one who I've been utterly intrigued by for a very long time.

@@HannahsBooks I’m inspired to pick up one of her books! Any particular one I should begin first?

@@The1christy I would vote for her Complete Stories. Start with A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, and Revelation, maybe? And please let me know what you think if you do try them out!

@@HannahsBooks Great...thanks! I definitely will. Read on. ☺️

I can imagine that she might-still trying to find those moments of revelation she wrote about. Interesting idea.

@@HannahsBooks I spent the day with them today, including a young man who talked to himself about AI as if he were in a Zoom meeting, but sans air pods or headphones, and I was trying to imagine how she would find the moment of grace in it. I could only think of the Lily Tomlin joke about how NYC should pair all the people who talk to themselves up so it would look like they were having a conversation.

I have the notes in front of me to remind me where I am in a story, but yes-I practice them until the words are really under my tongue. It is amazing to me how much the process of learning a story helps me understand so much of what an author is doing!

Thank you very much!

@@HannahsBooks I'm a fan and a new subscriber. I'm a huge Flannery fan, and you nailed the telling of that story.

@@ty9884 She’s an amazing writer. Thank you for the follow-but I will warn you that most of the time I am just chatting about the books I’ve read. (I am thinking of reading another O’Connor at the end of this month. It has been a while!)

PS: I believe Julian had, what therapists would now call, "Unresolved Issues." Don't you think, Miss Hannah? (And with a relic of a mother like that, it's no wonder.) But -- oh my! He had Mother Issues! "Darling! Sweetheart, Wait!!" Gasp! «Romantic Terms if Endearment! Don't all we Southern Sons! Our unresolved Guilt and Sorrow are un-abating.

The God-Highs," perhaps Miss O'Connor was inferring, as, it is certain, they were "Good Christian People." Wasn't everybody back then? Symbology as encased in names was a favorite of my Southern Lit professor's, Dr. O.B. Emerson's, at University. Another was "Possessive Before A Gerund," as preached by my high school English teacher, Aunt Katharine, my grandfather's younger sister. (Whom he educated, my catty, resentful mother would have been quick to have pointed out! Ah, a Southern Lit character of her very own! And speaking of therapy, it took YEAHS to break free! Ha.)

"...looked like a cushion with its stuffing out." Oh, my, Miss O'Connor. You made us all proud to be still-Southern Americans.

An Alabama boy! My father was a visiting professor there one semester in the 1980s-teaching Southern History-and they enjoyed some Faulkner conversations together!

I’m sure FO’C would not have used those words-but yes, absolutely a critique of anything that didn’t stem from true compassion and love.

I don’t think O’Connor was giving an example here of convergence at all-but instead thinking about the idea put forth by theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

And let me say more explicitly and simplistically that I interpret the two characters we should compare to be Julian and his mother. F’oC plays them off against each other and asks her readers to consider their competing goods and evils. She seems intent in many of her stories to knock self-satisfied characters into awareness of something more.