April 2026 - Spring

Hello all, this is the thread for the April 2026 theme of Spring.

I have in mind works that may contain Spring in the title, or be about the deeper themes of rebirth or renewal, especially after dark or troublesome times, that Spring often represents in literature.

I have not yet thought what I will read myself for this theme, and may edit this starter post in the coming days.

oh i love this theme so many possibilities!

What a great theme, John! Could that include romance? "But the true nature of the human heart is as whimsical as spring weather."

I'm thinking of trying the When Calls the Heart series. The second book is When Comes the Spring.

>3 Tess_W: I don't see why not, Tess :)

I am planning on reading Spring Comes to Emmerdale by Pamela Bell. Set during WWI, it follows a number of characters in the small rural village.

I'm going to do something a little outside-the-box. Over the years I've collected issues of Chicago History, which is the magazine of the Chicago Historical Society. It's published quarterly, and I've acquired them mostly at library sales, but have been rather lax in actually reading them. Each issue has about 72 pages and usually contains 2-3 articles by historians on Chicago history topics. So...I'll be reading these four SPRING issues:



Chicago History, Spring 1995
Chicago History, Spring 1996
Chicago History, Spring 2000
Chicago History, Spring 2012

I'm most excited about the Spring 1996 issue, which is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, so it's a fitting topic for next month.

>7 kac522: I love local history magazines like that. In fact, I used to serve on the editorial committee of Voyageur Magazine: Northeast Wisconsin's Historical Review.

>8 PatrickMurtha: I've lived in Chicago all my life and some of my ancestors came here a few years before the Great Fire of 1871. So there's always at least one article in each issue that sparks my interest.

My plan is to read Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev.

>10 MissBrangwen: That is one of my options.

It's Spring. It's April. Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote....

Gonna do a read/reread. Haven't picked it up since college over a half-century ago, considering particularly that I much prefer the Troilus. I have at least a couple Middle English editions around, one of them the Everyman which is exclusively the Canterbury Tales and another the complete works. I'll take a look-see and decide which is easier to handle (size-wise, I mean, easier to hold, and that's likely the Everyman) as well as which one has the better and more convenient vocabulary glossing (marginal or footnoted preferred over end-noting).

Also, I know I have at least a couple CDs around of Middle English readings of select prologues/tales. (I've also got a multi-record vinyl of the complete Troilus in Middle English, and I know where that is, though that's irrelevant for the April read.) Gotta see if I can find them in the mess around my house.

Heavy duty chunksters ahead of me, especially considering that I may have to extend the March read into April. For ante-bellum Southern slavery, I'm just about to start a reread (again, after over half a century) of Absalom, Absalom! but I'm doing it in the very recently published Norton Critical, so I've got a lot of supplementary material to read. For catch-up, I'm going to do a quickie for May, Miss Read's Thrush Green, the first in the series and set on May Day.

much ado about nothing is probably my favorite comedy of the bard it always reminds me of spring. its been a while since i read it. so id like to do that if i may

I have now decided I will definitely read Turgenev's Torrents of Spring.

spring

Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen

OK, March was a BAD month for me. I got nothing accomplished, having a lot of difficulty with COPD/CHF breathing but managing to stay out of the hospital though mainly sleeping during the day. Didn't get my March RTT read accomplished, the new Norton Critical of Absalom, Absalom! being too ambitious for the way I felt.

I'd been planning on a complete read/reread of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English for this Aprille with his shoures soote but I really do want to finish my March read. Hence, in lieu of Chaucer, I'm going with (for spring) Robert Henryson....

Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte
Suld correspond, and be equiualent.
Richt sa it wes quhen i began to wryte
This tragedie, the wedder richt feruent,
Quhen Aries in middis of the Lent
Schouris of haill can fra the north discend,
That scantlie fra the cauld i micht defend.

....the Ram being the first Zodiacal sign of SPRING!

I'm going to use Seamus Heaney's translation The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, though Henryson really doesn't need translation and Heaney very conveniently does a dual-language/facing-page edition. I've actually never read anything of Henryson beyond the Testament, which I first read back in college or graduate school at Villanova University, where I had a running and friendly debate with Joe Reino, Villanova's Middle English professor, over which was the second-best (after Chaucer) of the Troilus versions, with my favoring Henryson and his favoring Boccaccio's Filostrato (though in fairness I've never really known Italian and so had to rely on Filostrato translation, in prose at that).

In any event, if I'd done what I should have done (rather than going to law school) and gotten a doctorate in English, I'd most likely have written my dissertation on Henryson or perhaps some other aspect of Middle Scots and the Scots Chaucerians. As to Henryson himself, you really don't need a "translation," at least so long as you've got decent marginal glossing of unfamiliar vocabulary, and you should be able to read Henryson rather well if you're able to read Wuthering Heights with the dialect of Heathcliff's servant Joseph. Though a translation shouldn't be necessary, Heaney's translation did serve the purpose of exposing Henryson to a broader modern readership beyond that of the academy; and its facing-page translation lets you read the original Middle Scots while looking to your right for unfamiliar vocabulary and syntactic constructions.

This read/reread of Henryson should only take me a day or two, whereupon I'm going to return to Absalom, Absalom! to complete my duties for March.

>17 CurrerBell: I enjoyed reading your thoughts! I did the complete Middle English Chaucer in the Penguin edition a few years back. I had read chunks of it in the freshman English seminar at Yale in 1976, but not the entire thing. I have never tackled the Scots.

Absalom, Absalom! is not the world’s easiest read. I first read that at Yale, too; I took a class in Southern Literature there, and another later in the master’s program at Boston University.

>17 CurrerBell: Interesting about law school. While getting my Master's in Social Sciences I had to take two Constitutional Law courses. They were a bear. I can only remember that the ass sitting next to me (law school student) told me that I would never get an A, because: 1)this prof doesn't really give A's and 2) As a teacher I had no idea what I was in for. He really meant: you aren't smart enough. I got an A on the final and he got a B! Now, that's not to say that I didn't have to take a two week leave of absence from my job to study and prepare, but it was doable.

>7 kac522: Love this idea so much!

>20 Tess_W: Thanks--mostly it's a way to finally sit down and READ them. I've passed them over to read "real" books, but some of the articles look very interesting to me. And each issue has lots of great archival photos.

I have read Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev. This review contains spoilers.

This short novel packs quite a punch. Dimitry Sanin is a young Russian man travelling back from Italy to his homeland via Frankfort in Germany when by chance he saves a young man's life and falls for the man's beautiful sister Gemma Roselli. She is engaged to a German man Herr Klüber, but feels an increasing attraction between them. At a dinner, Gemma receives an unwelcome advance from another man von Dönhof, but it is Sanin who challenges his behaviour, not her own fiancé. Sanin and von Dönhof fight a duel at the latter's insistence, but agree there is no case to answer and shake hands. Gemma splits with her fiancé and the relationship develops with Sanin, who gets on very well with the whole family, in particular Emil, the prospective brother in law whose life he had saved.

Up to this point, the novel has felt quite light-hearted and enjoyable, but fairly inconsequential; I was questioning why this appears in lists of 1001 books you should read before you die. But then the novel takes a darker and more dramatic tone. Sanin by chance meets an old school friend Ippolit Polozov, who appears to be under the control of his wife Maria. Sanin negotiates with Maria for the Polozovs to buy his estate, so he can emigrate to be with Gemma. However, Sanin falls increasingly under the spell of Maria, who contrives to spend more and more time with him, and he starts to feel more emotionally distant from Gemma, against his better judgement. By the end he is almost a slave to her and her husband and has written to Gemma breaking off their impending marriage. The whole story takes place within a framework narrative in which Sanin is looking back in later life, having lost the woman he loves and also (how is not clear) broken free of Maria. The story might have ended there but Sanin tracks Gemma down to New York, where she has married and had children, he writes to her and they are reconciled as friends. This denouement perhaps reduces the punch of the novel a bit, but this is a powerful novel about love and obsession.

I may read at least one other Spring-related book this month (the Spring theme did not come across clearly to me in this one).

How is everyone else getting on so far with their Spring reads?

>23 john257hopper: Ha! I haven't started mine yet! I have a couple of short-story romances and I also have Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again. I hope to get to them all!

I read the Spring 1995 issue of Chicago History. None of the articles in this issue had a specific connection to Spring.
This issue featured 3 articles:

"Chicago and the Rise of Brewery Architecture" by Susan K. Appel described the "golden age" of American brewery architecture in Chicago. From the end of the Civil War until Prohibition, brewery architecture required certain engineering skills and technical knowledge of brewing. Chicago, with its central location and a railroad hub, attracted a large number of these specially skilled architects who designed projects throughout the United States and Canada. I thought the article was well-done and clear, following the history from the earliest men to the Prohibition era, when breweries stopped being built.

Design of Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Milwaukee, by Louis Lehle for Wolf, Lehle & Co., Chicago: from Chicago Historical Society archives:



"The Past and the Promise" by Olivia Mahoney is a history in photographs of the Douglas/Grand Boulevard Neighborhood in Chicago on the near South Side. Named for Stephen Douglas, who owned much of the land in the area, this neighborhood was once home to the wealthiest Chicagoans, and later became the famous "Black Belt" of Chicago, sometimes called Bronzeville. I thought this was the most interesting of the articles, particularly because of the archival photographs and the detailed background to each.

African American residential neighborhood circa 1925, 49th Street and Champlain Avenue; from Chicago Historical Society archives:




"Friendless Foundlings and Homeless Half-Orphans" by Joan Gittens is an excerpt from her book Poor Relations: The Children of the State in Illinois (1818-1990). This excerpt focuses on the orphaned and homeless children in the 19th century in Illinois. The article included devastating photographs of destitute children and descriptions appalling conditions and attitudes. However I had a hard time following it because it didn't seem to follow any particular structure--it discusses private institutions, the beginning developments of public institutions, and attempts to enact laws to protect children, among other topics. But it's not organized in any order. The article was not strictly about Chicago institutions, but rather the entire state, which is OK, but it was sometimes hard to tell what were state issues and what were city issues. I think because it was an excerpt, it didn't feel cohesive or logically structured. It was the longest article in this issue and the one I felt I got the least out of, except for the photographs. They told more of the story than the text did.

Unknown boy participating in the 1904 Chicago Stockyard Strike; from Chicago Historical Society archives:

The Human Seasons

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness–to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

John Keats
(1795-1821)

Lovely poem, though I think the depiction of Autumn is rather downbeat!

Finished one that I guess will fit this month: about gardens!
Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again by Paige Dickey Memoir about leaving an established home with cultivated and beloved gardens and beginning again. I listened to this on audio and it left something to be desired. Chapter after chapter description of flowers using their Latin names, which I had to look up, if I could "guess" at their spelling. That got too cumbersome so the last half of the book I felt I skimmed--didn't look anything up so I'm really unable to comment on the plants and shrubbery. Perhaps in the book it had pictures of all of the flowers mentioned and/or discussed? The first two chapters were lovely, about deciding to sell the home of 30 years and move. The rest of the listening was frustrating for me. 5 hours 17 mins 244 pages 2.5 for enjoyment, 3* overall RTT: April/Spring

Still hope to get to a couple more.

not a book, but some poems about april and spring from some poets you might know

To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.”

Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”

April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”

>17 CurrerBell: Finished Heaney's translation of Henryson at the beginning of this month and just posted a 2** review. Not a reflection on Henryson but a (rather purist) dislike for Heaney's translation.

2** to Heaney – though to Henryson (in my opinion, the greatest Scottish poet, surpassing Burns), 5*****.

From Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (Most of the poem deals with "spring" of some sort)

My favorite section!

>31 Tess_W: ....and there's the Kazan-Inge partnership in the film Splendor in the Grass starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty.

ETA: I place the Intimations ode as the second-greatest English lyric (after Lycidas), and I'm not generally a Wordsworth fan.

>32 CurrerBell: I'm with you on the poem. I've not read Lycidas, but I'm off to find.

There is a knock-off of the movie "Splendor in Grass" called 'A Summer Place', which I think is better!

ETA: Not usually a Milton fan, but I absolutely love Lycidas!

I found a book with Spring in the title to read for this month. The Hounds of Spring was the story of one momentous day in the life of Poppy, a dog walker on the cusp of a change in her life where she was not sure of taking the next step. A lot happened that day, one that just might have given her the strength to move forward.

>34 Familyhistorian: That one sounds fun!

I completed my read of Spring Comes to Emmerde by Pamela Bell. Taking place in Yorkshire during WW I and the influenza outbreak, I enjoyed this look at a rural village in days past that has now become a well known TV serial drama setting.

I finished another Chicago History magazine from Spring 1996. All three articles were about Abraham Lincoln:

--A history of the February 1909 Centennial celebration of the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth across the U.S.
--A photo essay of Lincoln memorabilia acquired by the Chicago Historical Society, from his death through 1995.
--Finally, a description of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates was my favorite article. These debates were in 1858 for U.S. Senator from Illinois between challenger Abraham Lincoln and incumbent Stephen Douglas, and occurred in several localities throughout the state. The article focused on them as events: how they were organized, who came and how they got there, and descriptions of the crowds, using newspaper accounts and personal memoirs as source material. Needless to say, it was a far cry from our controlled TV debates of today! Although Lincoln lost the Senate election, the debates helped make him a national figure.

>35 WelshBookworm: Short and sweet and written by an LTer.

found an interesting book for spring world of wonders in praise of fireflies whales sharks and other astonishments

I have finished Der erste Frühling (the first spring) by Klaus Kordon. It tells the story of twelve-year-old Änne in Berlin in May 1945, and it is written for this age group. Quite powerful, though, in the way her immediate family reflects the political divisions of the time. They are working class living in the Wedding quarter, and as they slowly return to the family hearth, Änne meets some of them for the first time.
Last book in a trilogy, and I’ll be looking around for the first two.

I read the classic Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I had not read this one before, but it was on my list to get to at some point, so I decided it was time. I can see how the book helped lead to the environmental movement. And what Carson writes about is still relevant today. I found it very worthwhile.