☯Emily ’s Comments (group member since Jul 27, 2011)

☯Emily ’s comments from the Classics for Beginners group.

I read this play last year and was struck by the bathroom situation. I would hate to share my bathroom with several other apartment dwellers. I thought that this was just the situation for blacks. However, it was not.

Last February my father died and I was sitting with my mother as she reminisced about their life together. She mentioned that when they first got married, they rented an apartment and had to share the bathroom with another tenant. She mentioned the difficulty of being pregnant and not having availability to the bathroom. I was shocked. However, my mother said that in 1952, most apartments did not have private bathrooms. Since the play was written in the 1950's, the bathroom scenes are very accurate.

Even though there are concerns about money, is the Younger family poverty-stricken? How would you characterize their financial status?

I have finished Scene 1 of Act 1. Even though there are no white characters introduced in this scene, how do whites affect the lives of the Younger family? What are each of the members of the family striving for?

BOOKS CURRENTLY NOMINATED:

1) King Rat by James Clavell
2) The Gate by Sōseki Natsume
3) The Crucible by Arthur Miller
4) King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
5) The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq
6. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

BOOKS CURRENTLY NOMINATED ARE:

1) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
2) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
3) The Hobbit or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
4) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Maya wrote: "How about James Clavell's "King Rat"? I don't see him among the recently read authors."

This book has not been read by this group, so it would be best to nominate it on the regular nomination thread found here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

This is the link to the changes made. If there was another agreement, please let me know. https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...,

I think we agreed to have rereads if they were read by group more than 3 years ago. We need to include that in the monthly rules for rereads.

The Master and Margarita was read by the group in 2/15. It can be nominated in the reread thread.

This is an article published in the New York Times about a year ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/ar...

This is a brief biography of Lorraine Hansberry: www.biography.com/people/lorraine-han.... She died in 1965 of pancreatic cancer at age of 34.

I was impressed with the fact that she was youngest American to win a New York Drama Critics Award. What would she have accomplished if she had lived longer?

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only was it a pioneering work by an African-American playwright--Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, one that was resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. (From book jacket blurb.)

Please discuss Acts 2 and 3 here. Spoilers are allowed. We can discuss the themes of the drama here. There was also a movie made from this script. I will encourage you to read the play before seeing the movie. We can discuss the movie and the play in this thread

This month we will discuss a play selected by a moderator, me!

This thread is to discuss Act 1 of Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Please do not discuss the second or third act or the play as a whole.

This thread will also talk about the author and her importance in America drama, as well as the play's relevance.

Just a reminder that you can nominate books that were read more than 3 years ago. Therefore, a book read before April 2016 can be nominated again.

Go to the bookshelf (see upper right corner of this page) to see when your selection was last read.

The listing of the authors not to read is listed in message #1 each month. To find books that have been read, go to the bookshelf to find the book and to see when/if it was read. The bookshelf link is on the upper right side of this page.

The Grapes of Wrath was read by the group in May 2015. You may nominate this book in the rereads thread found here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The main problem with Russian literature is the names. I found a listing of the main characters. There might be some spoilers in the descriptions. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/anna/c...

Poll is up. It does not include the authors of Victor Hugo or John Steinbeck, because the nominations should be a female writer. Thanks for understanding. I hope you will nominate these again.

Now that you have completed the book, we can review several themes first mentioned in the beginning of the book.

1) What do you think is the meaning of the very first sentence, which is "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

2) What does the train represent throughout the novel?

What do you think is the meaning of the very first sentence, which is "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

As you read the book, see if there are any happy families.

How is Anna describe in the beginning? Is she a sexy vamp? Why does she dance with Vronsky?