The Good Earth Discussion Schedule

Happy New Year classic readers!!! I’m Andi from Estella’s Revenge, and when Heather approached me to lead discussion during a quarter this year, I was surprised and delighted! It took no time at all to decide on Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. It was, by far, my favorite classic I read in 2010, and I have no hesitation about re-reading it with you all again this year. 

A brief introduction: February will be my 6th year of blogging. There have certainly been lots of ups and downs in that time, but I always come back to books and to my blog friends. In my daily life, I’m the Program Chair for General Education at a career college in Dallas. My department covers language, math, sciences, social sciences, communications, and all the other “basic” college courses. I also teach composition and literature courses. You might think I’d be really well-suited to lead a discussion of classics, but I’m not so sure!!! The classroom discussion is quite different from the online discussion, but I’m really excited to try!

While I’ve read my share of classics in school over the years, I’m constantly struggling to bring more classics into my fun reading, and The Good Earth is a perfect balance of the fulfilling classic with supreme readability. It’s just a great story, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have.

To give everyone time to gather their books, I’ve decided to start discussion in mid-February. Maybe that will give us all enough time to recover from the holiday season and get some books under our belts and ready for some discussion.

The discussion will be split into four parts:

• February 14th, Chapters 1-9 (Happy Valentine’s Day!)
• February 21st, Chapters 10-19
• February 28th, Chapters 20-28
• March 7th, Chapters 29-34

So there we have it! I hope you’ll dig up an old loved copy of The Good Earth, or maybe you’ll go out and buy a brand new one. Either way, it’s worth the journey into China’s past.

East of Eden Discussion Schedule

We have our reading schedule for East of Eden! I will try have questions posted 1-2 weeks ahead of time on my blog so that you know what to look for as you read. The dates below are the start of discussion for the section indicated. If you can have the portion read ahead of time, that would be helpful.

January 25th – Section 1 (Chapters 1-11)
February 8th – Section 2 (Chapters 12-22)
February 22nd – Section 3 (Chapters 23-33)
March 8th – Section 4 (Chapters 34 – end)

I hope you will all join us, and that you enjoy this book! I’m on my second copy already, because I destroyed by first one with rereads