The Richard Slotkin Reading Club

[truepenny]

So here's the deal. I have managed to find all three books of Richard Slotkin's trilogy about the mythology of the frontier in America, Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. These are fat books, an easy 600 pages a piece, and they are academically dense in their language, the sort of books where if you assigned one for a class, you'd space the response assignments out over the whole semester because nobody can just sit down and read the damn thing cover to cover. Your brain would fall out.

Since I want to read these books, what I'm going to do is treat them kind of as if I were reading them for a class: read a chapter, write a commentary, read something else, then come back, read another chapter, write another commentary. The Richard Slotkin Reading Club, membership 1.

I will tag and label these posts (which I am writing essentially for myself) so that they can be avoided by the sensible. But you're certainly free to read them if you want to.

Comments

[denorios.livejournal.com]

I dipped in and out of Gunfighter Nation when I was at university, but I've never actually read it. I really should. I wish they were available on Kindle - I seem to so rarely pick up an actual book these days...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You may be writing these posts for yourself, but others of us would be delighted to benefit from them.

(I have no idea if I'll ever dust off my trunked frontier fantasy, but if I do, I'll definitely need to think about this topic.)