Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor (audiobook)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 7 бер 2021
- Join me for a performance of Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." A free audiobook-style narration.
NOTE: This story is about racist characters at the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Characters occasionally use language that is not only outdated but also sometimes offensive now. It is crucial for understanding the story's plot and theme.
SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL:
PATREON: / hannahsbooks
KOFI tip jar: ko-fi.com/hannahsbooks
What a wonderful reading of this classic short story. It felt like I was sitting with an aunt or old friend telling me a story at the kitchen table. Such ease yet such clarity.❤️
Thanks!
I was already a fan of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Now, suddenly, I’m also a big fan of Hannah‘s Books. Terrific job of reading!
Thank you so much! What a wonderful comment!
@@HannahsBooks Among my faves: Good Man, Life You Save, Good Country, Displaced Person, Artificial N, Revelation, and . . . Parker's Back! (That one is not among the standard titles.)
I will definitely click on your reading of other titles!
@@geraldstinson881 I have filmed Good Man-and have been thinking about recording GCP and Revelation. Another one I really enjoyed filming was Eudora Welty’s Why I Live at the PO. Most of my channel is made up of chitchat about reading, but I do have a playlist of the story performances. I will look it up for you…
@@geraldstinson881 ua-cam.com/play/PLqkLQE2gbz-5a2ckqoeflFv4YR8FBe5-3.html is the playlist.
So great! Perfect for my morning walk.
O’Conner has a gift for creating realistic and yet grotesque scenes and for writing stories in which you can never settle on a character worth liking. It is unsettling and that unease extends, for me, to the author.
Brilliant reading!
Brian, you have pegged it. Both characters are worth liking in a few ways, and both are absolutely horrid in other ways. I have both adored and felt uneasy about F'OC since reading her letters right after college. Her complicated racial statements, her very judgemental religious beliefs, etc.--balanced with her sense of humor and her ability to observe so closely... Hope you are getting sun and lovely temperatures for your walks. It looks like we will be, starting today!
@@HannahsBooks I think if I could just make up my mind about O'Conner, I could go on and enjoy her work with a settled mind as I have with Faulkner. I'm not looking to "cancel" her. She was a great writer and her stories are so powerful.
Weather here has been great ever since the freeze.
Loved it. I would seek your audiobook narrations, hands down.
You are very kind. Thank you.
Had to read this story for my Short Story college class, and listening to your voice while reading made it so much more engaging. Thank you! ❤
Thank you so much! I hope you will have a good classroom conversation!
Fantastic reading. I really appreciate you putting this up here. I hope you have more O'Connor stories, and I look forward to checking out your other videos.
Thank you! I do have another O’Connor story up (A Good Man is Hard to Find) and am going to be filming both a Faulkner story (A Rose for Emily) and another O’C story (Good Country People) during August , I think.
Another great narration Hannah! I really want to watch your other Stories.
That was a hell of a reading of possibly my favorite short story. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Marian.
I my goodness, I was so moved by the story, so complex and so sad. Thank you for reading it so beautifully ❤️
Thank you. That sadness and bitterness and hope at the same time are definitely things that draw me to Flannery O’Connor.
I cried.
Wonderful reading, Hannah. Love your new background also!
Thank you! This is where I try to film the short story performances--just so my booktube friends will know this is a different kind of thing.
One of my favorite short stories. I plan to read it to my grandsons this week. Thanks for reading...nice job.
Thank you so much! I especially love the idea that you're going to read to your grandsons! Another one of my favorite O'Connor stories (which I might eventually try to record) is "Good Country People." I read it to a bunch of highschoolers in a class once--and they were rolling on the floor in laughter!
OH MY GOSH…
IJUST FOUND YOUR CHANNEL
🎉🎉I have won the life lottery🎉🎉
Thank you
Your comment made my day! Thank you.
Marvelous! Look forward to listening to your other recordings… great literature is a balm to my soul and psyche🙏👍✨
What a kind comment! Thank you!
What an incredible narration! Thank you, Mrs.Hannah! Greetings from Greece!
Thank you so much!
Awesome and brilliant reading Hannah!
. 🌸🙌🏼🌸
Thank you! It is a powerful story, although a difficult one to grapple with.
This is a great read!
Thank you!
Wow, what a stunning stiory. Thank you very much!
Thank you! O’Connor is just amazing. If you don’t know her “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” give it a try. It is widely anthologized, and if you want to listen, I read it on this channel.
I'm reading Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories for the Georgian Readathon, this was the first story in the collection. The same purple hat worn by the mother and the black woman was a surprise.
Yes indeed! (Did you notice my purple and green head wrap?)
@@HannahsBooks Indeed, you could have added a couple of peacock feathers for real Flannery O'Connor effect. You have a great reading voice.
@@jimsbooksreadingandstuff Thank you so much!
Wonderful performance, Hannah!
Thank you so much for motivating me to prepare this one!
Great reading, thank you.
Thank you!
That was amazing, both the story and your narration. How did you do it so smoothly with only one take?
I'll have to go back and check the other audiobook posts I've missed from you.
Oh gracious. Thank you so much for your compliments-but there are indeed lots of cuts where I lost what I was saying or had a tech issue or whatever. I am thrilled that the cuts were not overwhelming for you. Of my other videos like this, my favorite is Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O. I am hoping to make a recording of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily sometime soon. While I initially wanted to record a particular Alice Walker short story or a Virginia Woolf non-fiction piece, talking like a white southerner has kept me a bit limited...
@@HannahsBooks ok I didn't realize there were cute 😅 still flows really well
Hello I enjoyed this story.
Thank you!!
Thank You!
You do a beautiful job.
Thank you so much!
Love it 👏🤗✊
Thank you so much! O'Connor is such a fabulous writer. She has meant a lot to me for a very long time.
Excellent reading of this story. How do you do deal with copyright issue? I want to do this on UA-cam or create a podcast without profit or intent to monetize. I just want to do it for art of it. Please help me?
Riveted! Thank you!
Thank you so much, Christy! Flannery O'Connor is such an interesting author--one who I've been utterly intrigued by for a very long time.
@@HannahsBooks I’m inspired to pick up one of her books! Any particular one I should begin first?
@@The1christy I would vote for her Complete Stories. Start with A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, and Revelation, maybe? And please let me know what you think if you do try them out!
@@HannahsBooks Great...thanks! I definitely will. Read on. ☺️
do you memorise all these stories?
I have the notes in front of me to remind me where I am in a story, but yes-I practice them until the words are really under my tongue. It is amazing to me how much the process of learning a story helps me understand so much of what an author is doing!
If Flannery O'Connor were alive and writing today (she'd be 99), instead of setting her stories about mentally ill, conflicted, poor white trash, alcoholics, etc. in the rural south, would they instead be set in an urban public library?
I can imagine that she might-still trying to find those moments of revelation she wrote about. Interesting idea.
@@HannahsBooks I spent the day with them today, including a young man who talked to himself about AI as if he were in a Zoom meeting, but sans air pods or headphones, and I was trying to imagine how she would find the moment of grace in it. I could only think of the Lily Tomlin joke about how NYC should pair all the people who talk to themselves up so it would look like they were having a conversation.
Perfect voice.
Thank you very much!
@@HannahsBooks I'm a fan and a new subscriber. I'm a huge Flannery fan, and you nailed the telling of that story.
@@ty9884 She’s an amazing writer. Thank you for the follow-but I will warn you that most of the time I am just chatting about the books I’ve read. (I am thinking of reading another O’Connor at the end of this month. It has been a while!)
"The Y reducing class!" Only Miss O'Connor would put it that way. I'm as happy as if I too were doing something for the hat!
PS: I believe Julian had, what therapists would now call, "Unresolved Issues." Don't you think, Miss Hannah? (And with a relic of a mother like that, it's no wonder.)
But -- oh my! He had Mother Issues!
"Darling! Sweetheart, Wait!!"
Gasp! «Romantic Terms if Endearment! Don't all we Southern Sons! Our unresolved Guilt and Sorrow are un-abating.
The God-Highs," perhaps Miss O'Connor was inferring, as, it is certain, they were "Good Christian People." Wasn't everybody back then? Symbology as encased in names was a favorite of my Southern Lit professor's, Dr. O.B. Emerson's, at University. Another was "Possessive Before A Gerund," as preached by my high school English teacher, Aunt Katharine, my grandfather's younger sister. (Whom he educated, my catty, resentful mother would have been quick to have pointed out! Ah, a Southern Lit character of her very own! And speaking of therapy, it took YEAHS to break free! Ha.)
"...looked like a cushion with its stuffing out." Oh, my, Miss O'Connor. You made us all proud to be still-Southern Americans.
An Alabama boy! My father was a visiting professor there one semester in the 1980s-teaching Southern History-and they enjoyed some Faulkner conversations together!
Wonderful reading! Is this story a critique of self righteous wokeness?
I’m sure FO’C would not have used those words-but yes, absolutely a critique of anything that didn’t stem from true compassion and love.
Converge with what though? As with the word "relevant", something can only be relevant *to* something. Nothing is intrinsically relevant. And "rises"?
I don’t think O’Connor was giving an example here of convergence at all-but instead thinking about the idea put forth by theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."
And let me say more explicitly and simplistically that I interpret the two characters we should compare to be Julian and his mother. F’oC plays them off against each other and asks her readers to consider their competing goods and evils. She seems intent in many of her stories to knock self-satisfied characters into awareness of something more.