Finished reading: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein 📚
Enjoyed this a lot - as a self-proclaimed generalist maybe that was inevitable! But he had a ton of really fascinating examples and ideas.
Currently reading: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells 📚
Quick reread for book club tomorrow night. I’m leading it, so of course I’m procrastinating…. 😬
Currently reading: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein 📚
So this is a thing that apparently exists. 📚
Finished reading: A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918 by G. J. Meyer 📚
What a mind-boggling tragedy. 9.5 million dead, 15 million wounded. Three empires disintegrated. In the span of four years. I always talk about how much WWI changed the world and how that’s reflected in Modernist literature but now I don’t think I talk about it enough. This was recommended to me as the best one-volume history of WWI and it was great.
Finished reading: Consider This by Karen Glass 📚
Initially seemed like mostly a retread of Glass’s In Vital Harmony with a bit too much repetition, but in the second half it really picked up and it’s excellent on the idea of synthetic vs analytic learning. Lots of aha moments.
Sometimes history itself is tragically poetic.
Reading A World Undone. 📚
Currently reading: Consider This by Karen Glass 📚
I loved Glass’s book In Vital Harmony that runs through Charlotte Mason’s main principles of education. So beautiful. This one tied Charlotte Mason’s theories of education to the classical tradition and shows how much they’re doing the same thing. I teach in a classical school and have been trying to get more Charlotte Mason ideas into my school, and I’m looking forward to help from Glass! :)
Finished reading: Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose 📚
Really interesting read from a pair of liberal academics talking about how postmodern Theory and its offshoots (critical race theory, queer theory, post colonial theory, etc) are really not the best way forward for anyone. They do a good job of describing each theory and its tenets (some of this is pretty esoteric stuff), and their viewpoint as liberals (not conservatives) is fascinating on this topic.
Ongoing read-aloud: Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children by E. Nesbit 📚
My daughter as I get two paragraphs into Nesbit’s retelling of The Comedy of Errors.: “Oh, this one is going to be CONFUSING.”
She’s not wrong. #twins #somanytwins
I’m seriously considering getting a full set of print encyclopedias. I would have chosen Britannica but apparently they ceased print publication in 2012 and the only print encyclopedia still releasing new editions is World Book. Either way, I will need a new bookshelf first!
Currently reading: Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose 📚
Currently reading: A World Undone by G. J. Meyer 📚
Currently reading: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 📚
Oh, George R.R. Martin is going to end his book series differently than the Game of Thrones show? Gee, I wonder why! /sarcasm
George R.R. Martin has big updates on Winds of Winter and why his ending is very different from the show
#relatable
The used bookstore had a Memorial Day 50% off sale and I bought so many books they gave me a BANKERS BOX to carry them all out to the car. So far my husband has not kicked me out for the massive amount of books I keep loading on our overstuffed bookshelves, so that’s good.
This is either a remarkably critical celebration or a remarkably appreciative critique of P.G. Wodehouse.
P.G. Wodehouse and the Idea of Genius
“Readers who love Wodehouse know perfectly well that he’s no moral compass, towering intellect, or incisive commentator on his times. His genius resides in one simple fact: he had a wondrous way with a sentence. He subdued English grammar like a lion tamer, working himself into seemingly fatal complications before extricating himself with a flourish. He could turn a proverb inside out, cap an epic simile with a preposterous slangy coda, extend a metaphor to the breaking point and fold it neatly for another day—all while displaying a matchless ear for prose rhythm. Brief quotations don’t capture the full effect of Wodehouse’s style. One of his greatest set pieces, for example, involves a jealous young man trashing a London nightclub and runs on for several pages. A few shorter samples will at least hint at the Wodehouse experience.
Here is Bertie reminiscing in The Code of the Woosters:
The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God, and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bob’s worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a colored Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.”
I love this. This is how I hope I’m helping my students read.
“But good books demand our attention, great ones our full capacities. Any good book elicits the reader’s pleased compliance, but great ones move the whole soul. Drawn in, I follow where the mind of the author leads. If I’m reading well, I notice patterns and repetitions, I take metaphors seriously, I connect one passage with another. I underline, scribble on any available white space, and flip back through pages to find earlier passages when I sense a relation between parts of the narrative or argument. Reading is the action of holding complex things in mind, recalling previous details and anticipating new ones in the weave of meanings.”
