Practical Classics:

Hi, I'm Kevin. I spent a year rereading the books I was assigned in high school English class and wrote a book about the experience. That year produced so many morsels of joy about the books we all remember reading in high school that I'm collecting them here.

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Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. Done with puppets. Yes. 

[thedeadsee]

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“Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?” - and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.”

 - Carson McCullers

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Harper Lee and Truman Capote in 1966 during the writing of In Cold Blood. How'd you like to be in on those conversations? 

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'All I Want To Be Is The Jane Austen Of South Alabama'

Harper Lee

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Patriot's fans love Practical Classics! Or so I say.  P.S: I'm going to be posting pictures of readers with the book. Send me yours, it might just end up here, with your permission of course :)

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Toni Morrison loves The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Her reasoning for why is the stuff of amazing writing. Read. And enjoy. 

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Da Book. In the window of my neighborhood bookshop and available wherever fine books are sold. eBook version out next week.

Life goal. Attained. 

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Fun fact: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was originally to be published on Christmas Day 1884. The illustration above messed that all up. 

Look at the picture on the left. Does it look like Huck's Uncle Silas has got an erection in his pants? That's what the publisher thought and, fearing retribution, recalled 30,000 copies of Huck Finn and corrected the "error." 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn instead was published on February 18th, 1885. (via Mental Floss)

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Happy Birthday to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published on this day in 1885. (via The Writers Almanac)

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Death and dying in Hamlet & MacBeth. An infographic. (via ilovecharts:)

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…I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling.

Virginia Woolf

(via readandbreathe)

[ria-cruz]

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(via @ ria-cruz:)

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That's damn right. 

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Evil is whatever distracts.

Franz Kafka (via stuff--n--things)

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Trailer for Spike Lee's (1992) film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A bit mythologizing but a great American story of a great American life. 

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Source of the phrase: "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings"

Maya Angelou took the title of her autobiography from the poem "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Complete text of the poem is below. 

Sympathy

BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

    When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;   

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,   

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

    When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,   

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

    Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;   

For he must fly back to his perch and cling   

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

    And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars   

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

    When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

    But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,   

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

(via The Poetry Foundation) 

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Maya Angelou as a child. I'd guess about age 9.