October 26 - November 1

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
I have plowed through about half of this, although I still have a few hundred pages to go before class this upcoming week (yikes!). Luckily, it's a wonderful novel, one that I'm enjoying immensely and quite thankful for the required reading. The characters are delightful. Stowe did a great job blurring and simultaneously stressing the lines of race in this book, and I thoroughly enjoy the wit and fervor that appears in unexpected places and people. I must admit, everything about this book is not what I expected---in the best kinds of ways!

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1864
This is part of a really cool project for my American Novel class. We were assigned to choose a newspaper from the 1800s and read several copies of it. The one I chose was Frank Leslie's, as mentioned above, and it was based out of New York. The newspapers each had a specific format, which mainly featured a front page story on current civil war developments, followed by a summary of war events by state, as well as some local news and "chit-chat." The rest of each issue was split between submitted stories, poems, and even jokes by readers, and about two pages of ads to end. I developed favorite sections, which I would skip to first (those being "chit-chat," "accidents and offences," "Fun for the Family" jokes, and the ads). There was also a contest winner's story that was in the process of being published serially, about a chapter a week. The illustrated portion of the title was showcased in numerous multi-page sketches and illustrations done by a nameless "special artist" who would recount battle scenes, last week's fair, and decorated war heroes. Apparently they were featured as inserts that were sometimes even carved on wood or thin sheets of metal! How cool! Anyway, it's pretty awesome, and the year that I was reading (1864) can be found here.