Books 2008 -- November and December

List from Sidebar:

• The Singing Sands
• The Uses of Knowledge (Selections from Idea of a University)
• Last Days of Socrates
• Herodotus: Histories
• A Montessori Manual for Teachers and Parents
• Acedia and Me
• Ten Essentials of Highly Healthy People
• Homeschooling: A Family's Journey
• A Haystack Full of Needles
• The Elements of Teaching
• The Sparrow
• Schuyler's Monster
• 
  

Reading Reconstruction for August

Yesterday, we drove my oldest back to college with all his gear for his senior year. On the drive, I finally got a chance to finish Brideshead Revisited.

"...he had, too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism."

Just had to write that one out. ... a description of a classmate in the book... so I can say it to myself every now and then. Anything I say about his style would be heavy-handed, so I will just keep quiet. He is one of those writers like Wodehouse, Belloc and someone else I can't think of right now, who made me feel extremely American, very much like a new California winery. Here is an article about Evelyn Waugh.

I also got a good start on Becoming Attached, which turns out to be (in the first half at least) a sort of history of the theory of attachment, starting back with classic psychoanalysis and Freud's theories, and going up from there to show how difficult it was for early theorists to convince their peers that maternal deprivation did affect little children deeply and often permanently. It is an extremely interesting book to read.

Another book I just read was Do Hard Things -- I had been reading about it in various places, and when I found my library had it, I couldn't resist requesting it. My daughter read it too, and I agree with her take on it.

There was one more thing.... that's right! I finished the Spiritual Exercises. This probably doesn't count as a book reading, precisely, but if it did count as a book, it would be two books, since I also read Fr Hardon's Retreat with the Lord alongside.

I am still reading Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things by Madeleine van Hecke. I thought this would be like Sway, but it's more like a self-help book. Basically, the message is that understanding one's own blind spots and other peoples' should induce humility and understanding towards other people that do and think things that seem almost incredible to oneself.

One book I have requested, but which hasn't arrived yet, is Time and the Art of Living. I requested it because of Laura, who in turn got it from Susan. This raises the question of journalling -- every August I go through this questioning process, wondering WHY I think I want to maintain (however irregularly) four separate blogs. But I do think it's about journaling, and it is interesting to me that while I was pondering this, I came across Laura and Susan's posts, and also the final advice of Father Hardon in Retreat with the Lord:

Writing one's thoughts in a journal is highly recommended.

Still pondering though whether this means blogging, or whether there is really any purpose in having four separate blogs. Susan writes:

Over the years, I've often thought that I should keep separate journals for separate topics. That I should keep my spiritual ponderings and prayers separate from the journals of daily life. I've actually attempted to do that on occasion, but it never works. And as I read through this journal last night, I'm so glad it didn't. My journals reflects the reality my spiritual and daily life, the fact that they are interwoven and can't be separated into neat categories. They shouldn't be separated because it's all sacred.

I agree, and I feel the drain sometimes of setting up artificial categories between things that are basically integrated. And yet.... I have distinct purposes for each of my blogs, even if there is lots of overlap, even if I sometimes can't completely define each of the separate purposes; and I am afraid of muddling myself, I suppose.

One more half-thought. Susan quotes Robert Grudin, the author of Time and the Art of Living:

In writing your journal give primary attention to detail; for it is detail which organizes and preserves experience for your future self or some other reader. General statements like "We had a wonderful time" or "It was a dismal morning" make a mockery of the whole procedure, for they evaluate experience without recreating it. I kept long jurnals from ages ten to twenty-two, chronicling events and describing emotional states, but again and again missing they physical immediacy of experience, the tiny hooks by which experience could have been caught and held. I failed to record how we looked, what we saw, the minor eccentricities of circumstance which gave special character to a day. I ignored these elements not only through lack of training but through misplaced priorities. I mistakenly assumed that one could discuss the heart of things without discussing the surface of things.

I am wondering if this speaks to how difficult it usually is to make myself write out book responses, even though I'd really like to? I think what I most REALLY want to remember after I've read a given book is the meaning and context it had for me. But this is often difficult to organize or describe in a coherent way.

I think I write to try and GET to the particulars and their significance. The particulars themselves are endless, it's their selection that reveals the undertow. I suspect that that's why my writing is so often lacking in immediacy; because I am so often trying to struggle up to the surface and recognize what is meaningful, in order to record it.

Flannery O'Connor says something very much the same as Grudin, though about fiction rather than journalling -- that fiction writing is the art of the particular... .the universal has to be embedded or incarnated. Liam and I often discuss this, but I don't have time right now to find her exact words... off for Aidan's GI clinic and blood draws. This is a tangled mess to leave, but at least I wrote out that August reading list, and I guess the tangle reflects some of the tangle I'm trying to sort out under the surface right now ;-).

What I've Been Reading

I've been reading a lot recently so I thought I had better make a quick list -- I resolved to keep track this year, but as usual it always slipped to last place.

First, here are some book reviews Clare wrote for The Robe and for Out of the Silent Planet.
(note 5/30 -- and one more The Great Escape.)

That is what I'd LIKE to do with these, but in the meantime, the quick list.

Here is what I've read during May 2008:

• IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea by Stephen Murdoch. Very interesting reading indeed -- much about the history of the testing, how it linked to early eugenic theory.
• Childhood Speech, Language and Listening Problems -- What Every Parent Should Know -- good read, doesn't assume specialized knowledge but is not condescending "parent-speak" either. Since I'm taking over Aidan's speech therapy I thought I had better get in touch with the general big picture.
• Quotidian Mysteries -- Laundry, Liturgy and Womens' Work -- by Kathleen Norris. I loved this book -- it's very short, very perceptive, written by a poet.
• Education at the Crossroads-- by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain.
• Savior of Science -- by Stanley Jaki, Catholic scientist and philosopher -- about how only Christianity could set the conditions for the development of science.

In the Middle of at Present:

• Parenting from the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel. A book about attachment theory and how recognition and dealing with your personal "trigger issues" can lead to better parenting.
• Summer for the Gods -- by Edward Larson -- about the Scopes trial and "American's Continuing Debate over Science and REligion"
• Joining the Literacy Club by Frank Smith.
  

Note 5/30 -- I finished the first two. I have also started rereading Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education.

Books I read bits of but haven't finished:

• The Mindful Brain by Daniel Siegel -- I found it hard going.
• History of Philosophy vol 6 Wolff to Kant by Frederick Copleston SJ. I only read the section on Kant.
• Descartes to Derrida -- An Introduction to European Philosophy. By Peter Sedgwick. I only read the first chapter on Knowledge and Reason because that was the section that concerned Kant.
• Straight Talk about Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference in the Early Years--I skimmed this to see if I could find anything that would be useful for my struggles with Aidan, but didn't read every word.
  

Not much fiction on there. The last fiction I remember reading is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, but that was in April. Oh, yes, and I forgot:

• Jenny by Sigrid Undset. Definitely an immature "minor" work of one who went on to become a great woman writer. Plenty of promise, but still wrestling with her creative angel.

Kind of the opposite of East of Eden which struck me as an elderly type of book, with the excesses of garrulity of a great one who is past his prime. Excesses of verbiage, both in the philosophical vein and in the "fondly remembered past exploits" vein. Some of it fit into what the story was about but some of it went on too long. I should add that Clare had a much better opinion of it than I did.

Oh, and how could I forget! Two more I read:

• Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence
• Jane Austen by Carol Shields

Clare read these too. We had watched the movie Becoming Jane and both of us were curious how much of the movie was "fact" and how much "poetic license".

North and South

My daughter had the idea of spending a few moments writing out a response whenever she read a book for her reading goals this year. I am going to try to do the same -- like her, I am not going to try to write out a full review, just a few thoughts, so that is my disclaimer.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (here is my daughter Clare's view of the book)

Why I read it Clare received the book as a gift from a friend -- she read it recently after watching the BBC version which I got her for Christmas -- and she passed it on to me to read after she finished it. Plus, it seemed to fit in a bit with this economics reading I am doing since it is about the contrast between an industrial economy and an agrarian one.

Circumstances of Reading -- I started it two days ago but read the bulk of it yesterday and finished it last night. Kevin, Aidan and I escorted Clare by train partway to Thomas Aquinas College where she is going to visit her brother and the college. This gave Aidan a chance to ride the Amtrak, which he has longed to do ever since the first time Liam departed for college by that means. So I'll always remember looking up from the book and seeing a freight train flash by next to us -- painted-metal-freight-car -- then farmland -- painted-metal-freight-car -- then farmland -- in rapid intervals. Also the GIANT bales of cotton in a huge grey field (we were going through the San Joaquin Valley at the time). Not at all like Gaskell's North and South, but evocative anyway.

Reading Thoughts --

"So between masters and men, the wheels fall through"

This book takes a look at a specific historical time through a filter of change. Changes in society as expressed by the tension between the new North and the traditional farming South; changes in religion (the events of the book are precipitated by Margaret's father's crisis of conscience which leads him to give up his position as a minister in a small country village); changes in life circumstances; and changes in opinion (Margaret moves towards respecting the Northern virtue and practices while Mr Thornton moves towards a less harsh and distant treatment of his workers, and the workingman Higgins moves towards a better understanding of the challenges faced by the "master").

This is what I noticed most. The novel form allows the author to take a time frame of three years and show the changes in society reflected through the lives of the main characters. It is well done -- you can see the movement in many symbolic details of various subplots -- for example, the worker Boucher's downward movement to final drowning in a stream, of all things, is countered by both Higgins (the Union man) and Thornton (the master) taking responsibility for raising and educating them.

In the end, the "solution" proposed to the turmoil caused by changing social conditions is a human one, not an economic or political one -- a matter of acknowledging that no man is an island, that we are bound to each other, that human contracts go beyond economic ones.

There is also a strong theme that an acknowledgement and acceptance of reality as it is will lead to better results than a denial of reality. This plays out through Margaret's father's gradual recognition of his wife's fatal illness, and through Mr Thornton's changes of fortunes through the strike and the price changes in fortune, and Margaret's own acceptance of the reality that there may never be a chance for her brother to vindicate himself in the eyes of English law.

Related to that is the emphasis on truth in perception and integrity in action -- a major plot line is concerned with a falsehood told by Margaret and what that reveals to her about her own lack of faith and courage.

There is a chapter near the end of the book where Margaret goes back to the village that she remembers as a sort of earthly paradise and finds it changed during the years of her absence:

All night long too, there burnt a little light on earth; a candle in her old bedroom, which was the nursery with the present inhabitants of the parsonage, until the new one was built. A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, over-powered Margaret. Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it....

And a bit later:

'After all it is right,' said she, hearing the voices of children at play while she was dressing. 'If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt,.... Looking out of myself, and my own painful sense of change, the progress all around me is right and necessary. I must not think so much of how circumstances affect me myself, but how they affect others, if I wish to have a right judgment, or a hopeful trustful heart.'

She realizes that change is inevitable in an imperfect contingent world, and that a right personal response is required. Once she realizes that she is able to take responsibility for making decisions herself rather than simply letting herself be guided by what others seem to need from her, and this is a step on her road from girlhood to taking a place in society as a mature woman.
--------------

I found myself reading the book to Paddy, who is five, and this is how it came about --

I had already read Paddy's bedtime stories and was trying to settle him down to sleep. I told him it was my turn to read while he went to sleep and he asked me, "Can you read your book out loud and put your finger on the words as you read?" So I did -- I was reading chapter 13,

'Fluff,' repeated Bessy. 'Little bits, as fly off fro' the cotton, when they're carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there's many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spittingblood, because they're just poisoned by the fluff.'

'But can't it be helped?' asked Margaret.

'I dunno. Some folk have a great wheel at one end o' their carding-rooms to make a draught, and carry off th' dust; but that wheel costs a deal o' money--five or six hundred pound, maybe,and brings in no profit; so it's but a few of th' masters as will put 'em up; and I've heard tell o' men who didn't like working places where there was a wheel, because they said as how it mad'em hungry, at after they'd been long used to swallowing fluff, tone go without it, and that their wage ought to be raised if they were to work in such places. So between masters and men th' wheels fall through. I know I wish there'd been a wheel in our place, though.'

and Paddy was fascinated with the fluff, and a bit fearful. I was surprised that he would listen for two or three pages to such a discursive book, which alternates between detailed description, and equally painstaking dialogue, with not very much action that would seem interesting to a five year old boy.

Reading -- What and How and When

I have been learning a lot recently. I am trying to read along with the group who is discussing Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Cindy at Dominion Family is leading the discussion, or perhaps hosting would describe it better. Here is the Mr Linky list of posts from Week One. I actually compiled and printed out every single post (37 pages) and read it all and filed it in my notebook along with the printout of the Hazlitt book, hoping to get a jumpstart on it..

Anyway, this book is not very complicated to read, but it has become one of those "golden threads" that seem to lead me through all sorts of corridors and into new regions or old ones now seen differently. I hope I manage to write a post on the book in time for next week when Cindy posts Week Two, but I am a bit intimidated by the high quality of the discussion and not at all confident about my own understanding of economic theory. My husband got a minor in economics and he knows this stuff, but it has not rubbed off on me.

Over here there is a page I made last time I was following the economics golden thread. That time it started by reading Crunchy Cons (I had mixed feelings about the book). If you notice that the book list sort of fizzles out into natural home care books, there is a reason for that. For after all, economics has a human, personal, and essentially familial dimension -- the etymology is "house" and "management", after all. I think that is a key idea I am pondering as I read Hazlitt's book this time -- that economics are for man, not man for economics. But more on that probably self-evident idea later.

Back then, I got part way through Economics in One Lesson but got busy with life, I guess, and put it aside. This time I'm hoping to read it all and learn something from the other people who are reading it.

Now, an update on my learning goals.

I have already met my goal in regard to the encyclicals. I wanted to read five and I have read the following:

1. Providentissimus Deus (on the study of Holy Scripture)
2. Libertas (on the Nature of Human Liberty)
3. Rerum Novarum (on economics and the state of the worker)
4. Pascendi Dominici Gregis (on the Doctrines of the Modernists)
5. Humani Generis (on Evolution and the origins of man)
6. Dei Verbum (on Divine Revelation -- this is actually a Dogmatic Constitution)
7. Fides et Ratio (on Faith and Reason)
8. Laborem Exercens (on the Human Worker)
9. Centesimus Annus (a reflection on Rerum Novarum at the centenary -- I haven't finished this one)
10. Spe Salvi (on Christian Hope)

The first three are by Pope Leo XIII. I am very impressed with his writing (which sounds very inappropriately patronizing -- it is like the absurd commentary in the Bible I am reading that says that the author of Genesis shows "real literary talent". Please!). Anyway, I'm going to upgrade my encyclical resolution and promise to read at least a couple more encyclials after I finish Cent. Ann.

I am also reading through the Catholic Bible and the Catechism -- the reading plan is linked at Running River Latin School. So far I have read Genesis and the gospel of John, and the first section of the Catechism. (I am not doing it quite the way the plan has it, which is to read a bit from several different parts of the Bible in one day -- this would be a good plan for reading to the children and perhaps I may do that, but it is too difficult for me to jump around like that when I'm reading silently).

Faith asked how I find time to read and so here are some things that work for me:

1. I do the bulk of my reading on vacation breaks. On this break I can read almost a book a day; on regular homeschool days it's probably about 30 minutes after dinner and at bedtime.
2. I read fast on the first run through... ... and then reread the parts that are worth closer study. This helps me get through lots of books where it isn't necessary to read every single word carefully.
3. I bring a book almost everywhere so I can read during waiting moments.... in the car, in waiting rooms.
4. I read when I should be doing something else, like cleaning the house. (But really, sometimes it does seem like a fair trade-off -- I can clean the house tomorrow).
5. I am not a big TV / movie/ video game person so I never watch them or do them unless my kids or husband want me to.
6. I usually don't even spend that much time on blogging -- I only catch up on other blogs about once or twice a week, and I can usually type mine out pretty fast (well, this hasn't been true recently, but usually it is)
   
7. We live in the country so there are not a whole lot of other things going on -- this has pluses and minuses, but the extra time is a plus.

There are more ideas about the why and how of making time to read over at Dominion Family.

Reading for 2008

Dominion Family and Mommy Brain have lists of their reading in 2007. And Faith at Dumb Ox Academy has made a list of her reading plans for 2008. These are fun to look over for ideas.

I was not organized enough to keep track of my reading throughout 2007. What I did list is here and here. I just do not have the energy right now to extract all the names of books from those long reviews, but next year I propose to do better about keeping lists.

I think, though, that I'll try once again to list reading goals. Like Faith's, but by season rather than for the whole year.


Right now I am reading:

• From Dawn to Decadence
• Economics in One Lesson

I just got from the library:

• Auralia's Colors
• The Legend of the Firefish
• Tevye's Daughters

so I will probably read those as a break from the heavier ones.

That's the plan, which will probably take me through winter.

There ought to be some self-help/pop psychology books in there somewhere. It is funny that my daughter's violin teacher and I both read self-help books for light reading. I suppose the good ones are a bit like a collection of short stories with a theme, or like talking to with a bunch of memories wrapped around a single topic. But I only do it when I'm too tired even to read a good novel. I suppose it's the equivalent of watching Oprah or Dr. Phil for people like me who hate watching TV (and I actually did read 2 Dr Phil books last year because our library had them in the dime rack).

I have been trying to read a book of poems by Emily Dickinson but forgot about it for a while.

• I intend to read Paradise Lost.

There is also a collection of education-related books that I am going through slowly:

• The Art of Teaching
• A Humane Psychology of Education
• Effective Study
• Studying is Hard Work

and after I read Economics in One Lesson I want to read Small is Still Beautiful.

As for the GBWW I want to start with Montesquieu and Locke and go from there.

Happy New Year!

Some Learning Goals for 2008

αμαθεστατε και κακε, αφες τον παλαιον, μη μεταποιει
(Fool and knave, can't you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!)

—The complaint of a scribe, written in the margin of Codex Vaticanus at Heb. 1:3.

My father gave me a Latin Vulgate Bible for Christmas. This is thrilling. He bought me one once before, but I gave it to Liam to take to college with him since I had more accessible internet than he did at the time. But I have missed it very much since.

When I was visiting them in Alaska, my father told me about his recent habit of combined devotions and language study. He reads a given section of the Bible in the Latin Vulgate. Then he reads it in Greek. Then he reads an English translation. (I may have the order wrong). This allows him to keep up familiarity with Latin and Greek and also really get deeply into the language of the Scripture. This kind of studying is so typical of my father. Anyway, I thought I might do something slightly similar on a way more amateurish scale. It might help me keep just slightly ahead of my two middle ones in those languages, which would be nice, plus provide a new way to ponder the familiar Gospels. Nathaniel Bowditch, I read once, whenever he wanted to learn a new language, would acquire a Bible in that language. Since he knew the contents of the Bible so well, he could inductively discover the grammar and vocabulary of the new language from the context of the Bible.

The cranky quote above is from this site with links to Greek New Testaments. Here is another Greek NT. And here is the Vulgate Bible online with interlinear King James and Douay Rheims translations.

audiens sapiens sapientior erit et intellegens gubernacula possidebit
"A wise man shall hear, and shall be wiser: and he that understandeth shall possess governments."
(from the Vulgate/Douay Rheims/King James site linked above).

I need my Costco magnifying spectacles to read the hardbound Vulgate, which is sad. Another book in the "magnifying spectacles" and "acquired from my father" category that I am reading is From Dawn to Decadence which I first heard about at Dominion Family. So far I am agreeing with her take on it. It takes forever to read ten pages and the magnifying glasses give me a headache. But I really want to finish it. The reason I was motivated to start it was because of Liam talking about Spinoza. The only book I could find around the house on this time period was Classics of Western Thought, vol 2, which was one of my college texts. It is basically an anthology, like Norton's, of well, the classics of Western thought. I read this over Christmas. ...not the medieval section, but the Renaissance and Reformation selections. But it was only a taste of, let's see, Castiglione, Montaigne, Cellini, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. Just a sample, and not enough. Then I decided that Dawn to Decadence might give me a big picture view. I am not sure yet if it will or not. It is interesting, though. I decided to read Pope John Paul II's Fides et Ratio as well, and finished that yesterday. I had read excerpts of it previously, but never the whole thing, so I'm glad this weird recent obsession of mine with secularist philosophy led me to follow through with reading this excellent document.

Besides doing the interlinear Bible study I described above, and furthering my understanding of vulgate Latin and koine Greek, I hope to:

• Read several more of these Encyclicals.(They are arranged in chronological order on this site, which is very nice)
  
• Read several more of these Great Books of the Western World.

This would have seemed way way too ambitious to me last year, but for some reason, I have recently been able to confront books that would have daunted me before. It is very strange. I just read several old books on studying and learning, from the bibliography of Francis Crotty's Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home, and so perhaps I have absorbed some of the methods proposed in the books.

So those are my three learning goals for 2008. I am keeping them quite vague because -- well -- just because. I do not know how long this enthusiasm will last.