Catholic Thought discussion
Quo Vadis
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Schedule and Introduction
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Manny wrote: "I'll have an introduction on Quo Vadis and the author shortly."Thank you for your work in figuring out this schedule!
Manny my Kindle Version has page numbers in case you are interested.
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Celia, could you just pm me with chapter number and page it starts? Once I have that I can figure out how to group the weekly reads.
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Is it just my copy, or do all editions of this book have dialog loaded with thees and thous?
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As the subtitle implies us, “A Narrative of the Time of Nero,” Quo Vadis is a historical novel set in first century within the Roman Empire. “Quo Vadis” translates to “Where are you going?” and was published in in Polish in 1896 by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The story centers around a love interest between Marcus Vinicius, a Roman tribune and patrician, and therefore pagan, and Callina or sometimes called Lygia, a convert Christian and a daughter of a deceased barbarian king. Like most historical novels there are a number of fictitious characters and characters taken out of the historical time. Both the central characters are fictitious. Also like most historical novels, there is a vast sweep of events and many characters. You can read the major character list on the novel’s Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vad... You will recognize the Emperor Nero, deranged and known for his narcissism and persecutor of Christians. Of Nero we know he was emperor when the great fire of Rome occurred, and indeed some claimed he set or had the fire himself and then turned and blamed the Christians and followed up with a great persecution of Christians. I expect this will be a scene in the novel.
The character list also includes the apostles Peter and Paul who were in Rome at the time of Nero’s persecution of the Christians. I expect their martyrdom will also be dramatized. If Quo Vadis employs other historical novel techniques, I expect there will be an alternating between Roman pagan scenes and Christian scenes culminating in some great climax between the two world views. But I have not read any summary except of the love interest between the two central characters.
Henryk Sienkiewicz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_... was born in Poland in 1846 to a noble but impoverished family. The family still had a coat of arms. He started as a travel writer, including spending time in the United States, and a journalist, and attempted several fiction efforts early on. The shorter pieces were published but not the novels. He finally published his first novel in 1880, a historical novel, and from 1883 to 1888 went on to write three novels which are known as The Trilogy, narrating the major events in Polish history. Sienkiewicz was of the persuasion that a work of art, especially a novel “should strengthen and ennoble life, rather than undermining and debasing it.” One would expect that there is a strong moral element to his works and speak to the “good” in the transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty.
Sienkiewiczw published Quo Vadis in 1886 at the age of forty. He went on to write a number of epic historical novels, but he seems best remembered for his The Trilogy and Quo Vadis. His work was extremely popular in his day both in his native land and throughout Europe. He received the Nobel Prize for his “epic works” in 1905 and lived until 1916 to the age of 70. He has a lasting legacy in Poland and in many European countries.
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I’m looking forward to this one.
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Adjustment on the schedule. Chapter 7 is huge. Let's do chapters 1 through 6 the first week. I'll adjust the following week later.
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I had a hard time becoming involved until Lygia (sp?) came in to the story. Then things seemed to become better.
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Week 1: Chapters 1 – 6
Week 2: Chapters 7 – 14
Week 3: Chapters 15 – 20
Week 4: Chapters 21 – 27
Week 5: Chapters 28 – 34
Week 6: Chapters 35 – 41
Week 7: Chapters 42 – 49
Week 8: Chapters 50 – 56
Week 9: Chapters 57 – 63
Week 10: Chapters 64 – 71
Week 11: Chapters 72 – End
I haven't put dates on the weeks because we will be breaking at some point for our Christmas read. These will be the weekly increments.
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https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
The week of December 10th will be the read week, and the week of December 24th will be the discussion week for the short story. We'll return to week 5 of the Quo Vadis read on December 31st.
So I think the easiest thing to do was to go with seven chapters per week. I came up with seven by figuring eleven weeks for about 50 pages per week of a 582 page book. And eleven weeks into 74 chapters, counting the epilogue as a chapter, results in about seven chapters per week. Some chapters are short and some chapters are pretty long but hopefully over the course of seven chapters per week it should average to around 50 pages. But if we find we have a week with a lot of long chapters, we can extend it. So here's how I see the first few weeks.
Week of:
Nov 12: Chapters 1 thru 7
Nov 19: Chapters 8 thru 14
Nov 26: Chapters 15 thru 21
Dec 3: Chapters 22 thru 28
Dec 10: Chapters 29 thru 35
Now at about that point, give or take a week, we break for our Christmas read, which has become our tradition over the last few years. I'm not sure how Kerstin will want to do it this year (she normally handles the Christmas read) but we have nominated and voted on the Christmas read like any other read. Or sometimes we just select from a list Kerstin keeps.
But it will be a few weeks for the Christmas read and then we'll pick back up on Quo Vadis.
Hope that sounds acceptable.