Troy Of Legend

Happy Halloween!

Back to books tomorrow, but here's a little silliness to tide you over:



The Jack-o-lanterns are made from sushi rice which we cooked with shredded carrot and then formed into balls. My son meticulously cut out the faces from sheets of nori.  For the stems, we used some food picks shaped like leaves, but you could easily use a little piece of green bean or something.  We got the idea for the pumpkin onigiri from the blog Happy Little Bento.

The severed fingers are hotdogs (which we got at the Amish farm where we buy our meat) with a few slices here and there--very easy and quite, well, disarming.... Directions can be found at Adventures in BentoMaking.

The rest of the lunch box (a stainless steel container from LunchBots) is packed with raw sugar snap peas, a little lettuce, and a bloody dipping sauce.

Lunch is usually a lot less exciting around here!

New to My TBR Pile

While on our beach vacation, my family spent a bit of time in a wonderful independent bookstore just steps from the ocean: Browseabout Books. The store is large--full of souvenir/giftshop stuff on one side, but on the other a much larger selection of books than I expected from a beach bookstore.

I sat for a few minutes reading the introduction to the Penguin edition of Charlotte Bronte's Villette--a novel I have not yet read but now have on my nightstand. Since I had been thinking about Bronte all weekend, this novel seemed like a must-read.  Although Browseabout did not seem to have the Modern Library Villette, I'm eager to read A.S. Byatt's introduction to the novel in that edition. 


I then stumbled across a new edition of the plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg and James Scully.

Although I carried Bagg and Scully out of the bookstore before I have poked into it thoroughly, I'm thrilled to see that Christopher, who blogs over at ProSe, is quite pleased with this translation. After braving a bit of carsickness to have a peak at it on the way home from the beach, it looks fantastic.  (Have any of the rest of you looked at it yet?)

Incidentally, Christopher's blog was one of the first book blogs I found when I started searching for people who were committed to reading classic literature. I immediately loved the way he combined deep analysis of what he read with a discussion of his personal and emotional responses. (His passion for Thomas Hardy led me to read a little bit of that author before I started my project.) Then Christopher got busy and he took a bit of a blogging break. Then I did. Recently he's left some really thoughtful comments on some old posts here at the Lifetime Reading Plan. They've helped convince me that it is time for me to come back to the blog and begin to write about what I'm reading again--more frequently than once every week, or two...or three.

In one of those comments, Christopher let me know that Stephen Mitchell planned to release his own translation of Homer's The Iliad. Lucy Pollard-Gott, author of the fabulous Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend, was also kind enough to steer me towards this new translation.  Thank you both so much!

I'm so excited to read this edition!  Homer's The Iliad completely caught my imagination in a way I never expected, and I also adored Stephen Mitchell's introduction to the Gilgamesh epic. But before I allow myself to dive in (perhaps in early January?), I'm planning to complete some other reading projects--from some Greek drama to a couple of Victorian novels and even to a bit of 21st-century experimental poetry.  Stay tuned.

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As much as fiction calls to me, there are times in my life when nonfiction takes over almost completely. I'm about halfway through Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality about the current global economic and environmental crises. It is not an easy read--intellectually or emotionally--but it is both important and thoughtful. Some of Heinberg's writing (perhaps especially his Powerdown about possible responses to resource depletion such as Peak Oil) is really quite lyrical as well.

I'm also loving the work of Bill McKibben. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (about the links between social structure, environmental destruction, and resource depletion) is a wonderful place to start--although I first discovered McKibben's writings back in 1999 or so when I read his Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families right as my son was born.  I read it because I wanted to convince my partner David that we should have only one child--a decision I made for myself when I was eight years old.  I finished McKibben's memoir/study with a much deeper sense that my personal choices mattered.  Whether or not you agree with McKibben's specific argument about having smaller families really doesn't matter.  The book gently but forcefully calls us to live up to our ideals and think about our responsibilities to the world.  It was a life-changing book for me.

Like Heinberg, McKibben combines the skills of a visionary thinker with those of a careful and inspired writer.  Both require a great deal of attention, and both will leave you thinking for months.

Doctors without Borders

My husband (a physician) and I (a historian with a PhD) were eager to pick out books to enjoy on our recent beach weekend.  Although I certainly appreciate the independent bookstores in our area--especially the marvelous Politics and Prose--I must say that as a non-driver, I was a bit addicted to the chain bookstore within walking distance of our house.  And this time, due to big work projects that each of us were engaged in before our little vacation, David and I were both rushing around like mad as we packed.  A quick bookstore run was really all we had time for.  Alas:

Turning

My family recently spent a lovely weekend along the Delaware shore.  It was a weekend of reconnection after an especially busy few weeks, full of reading and writing and thinking, and full of lots of really fantastic beer at our favorite brewpub.

For several years now, we've had the very unorthodox tradition of spending part of the Jewish high holidays at the beach.  Although our commemoration of the holidays is not religious, we are still moved by the personal reflection these holidays encourage. 

One of the central metaphors of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is the idea of turning--the turning of one year into the next, the turning away from our pasts and into what we can make of our future, and the turning to our highest selves.  David and I chose to focus on this idea during one of our beach days, following the traditional religious practice of offering our apologies and our forgiveness to each other--for hurts we knew about as well as hurts of which we were unaware.  We exchanged vows to help each other become our highest selves, but also to be patient with each other as we stumble toward those goals.

Photography by our son; Sweater knitted by me!

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When I think about how two people try to balance personal reflection, sometimes-conflicting moralities, and a deep commitment to each other, I can't help but think of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. I read the novel for the first time when I was just about the age of our 12yo son. I was deeply moved by the shy and plain Jane who fought her passionate self in order to do what she felt was right, no matter what others thought of her. So much of my personality--a shy but bull-headed woman who is definitely overly moralistic, fiercely outspoken with the people she loves most, and usually non-confrontational and polite to strangers--is a mirror image of what I saw in Jane Eyre. I have no idea if I loved the novel because I saw in Jane much of what I saw in myself, or if I loved the book so much that I made myself in Jane's image.

My husband did me the very great honor of reading Jane Eyre this year (after resisting my almost constant badgering for almost twenty years). He loved it--and saw much in it that I had not seen in my many, many rereadings. I've loved getting to talk more about this book I have loved so deeply for so many years. I'm eager to read it again soon.

My son, meanwhile, is currently gobbling up The Eyre Affair and its sequels. I am thrilled to hear him laughing aloud at the literary jokes!

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In the evenings at the beach, the three of us watched my favorite film version of Jane Eyre: the BBC miniseries starring actress Ruth Wilson. (My husband knows Wilson from her current role on our beloved mystery series Luther. If you don't know the series and have Netflix streaming, go watch season one right now. Or check it out: you'll appreciate the captions.)

Although both my son and my partner enjoyed the miniseries, I think David was pretty disappointed with some of the changes it made from the book. I love Wilson as Jane Eyre. And I adore Toby Steven's Rochester--both unpleasant and completely loveable. (Personally, I don't see what Jane sees in Rochester in the Mia Wasikowska version--although I do like Judi Dench as Jane Fairfax.)

Somehow, I think all of our thoughts about turning should not really be leading us to think about the turning of books into movies...

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In the next couple of posts, I'll talk a bit about the books we brought along and what I am making of my current reading.

Banned Books

This weekend was our local library's second annual celebration of banned books.  While librarians projected illustrations from books onto large screens, people from the community read aloud from classic children's stories. 

One gentleman read from a version of "Little Red Riding Hood" challenged because Red was taking alcohol (a bottle of good red wine) to her grandmother.  One woman did a dramatic reading of a scene from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe--an explicitly Christian-themed book--challenged because of its discussions of mysticism.  Our state senator read from one of my very favorite books from childhood, Norton Jester's The Phantom Tollbooth--which was effectively banned when a librarian in Boulder, Colorado took it off the shelves and stored it in the locked reference collection because the librarian deemed it "poor fantasy."

Many people read picture books--some of which I knew and some which were new to me.  Have any of you seen William Steig's book The Amazing Bone?  The story is utterly random, hysterically charming, and very sweet.  A parent wished to have it excised from public libraries because it features the use of tobacco by animals.

Although most of the readers were adults this year, three young people read as well.  One girl read a favorite scene from Harry Potter and shared her undying passion for the whole series.  Another read from Elizabeth Speare's Sign of the Beaver, a 1984 Newberry Honor book challenged because of its use of the word squaw to refer to an American Indian woman.  My 12yo son read from Katherine Paterson's gorgeous Bridge to Terabithia, a book which has been challenged many times in many places for many reasons.  The section my son read tells what happens when a nonreligious girl goes to church with her friend.  The scene is gently written, extremely respectful of belief and non-belief, but also deeply probing.

The Banned Books Reading was a joyful celebration.  People rolled their eyes at some of the reasons books have been challenged.  In other cases we realized how much fear there is of beliefs and questions different from our own.  I've never heard of this kind of commemoration before but am sure it must be done elsewhere as well.  Does your town or library acknowledge Banned Books Week?  How do you celebrate?

A Path Full of Brambles

Ever read books not assigned to you in class? Write about them on your blog? Or maybe read about books on other people's blogs? If so (and of course it is so, since you are reading this book review), consider yourself officially gifted.

Lisa Rivero is one of my homeschooling gurus. Her early book, Creative Home Schooling: A Resource Guide for Smart Families, is full of ideas and insights which have shaped my family's experiences as my son has grown from a brilliant and kind small boy into a brilliant and (mostly) kind young man. Her newest book, A Parent's Guide to Gifted Teens: Living with Intense and Creative Adolescents, is not about homeschooling per se.  Instead, Rivero attempts in her newest book to help parents deal with the difficulties that their gifted children may present to them.

I wrote a post not that long ago about the books I read in preparation for my son's upcoming homeschooling year--and I want to assure those of you who have absolutely no interest in this subject that I have no intention of letting this blog become a homeschooling blog.*

I hesitate to use the word "gifted" at all since it has such negative meanings in popular culture. It sounds like bragging.  Many of us who love learning (pretty much one of the definitions of gifted) have been taught not to brag about what comes to us more from the combination of good genes and good opportunities than from personal hard work.  Many people believe the word "gifted" is a label only adopted by people who want to set themselves off as better than others.  But that is not at all the truth which Rivero is trying to talk about.

What I love most about Rivero's work is her exploration of the way that giftedness is no sign of superiority.  Instead, it is a sign of difference, of weirdness, even (at least in experience) of abnormality: "I have heard more than one parent complain that it is tempting to say that his child suffers from giftedness rather than he is gifted.  Maybe this helps to explain how hard it can be, for both child and parent.  People who insist that being gifted is a walk in the park don't understand that the park, while beautiful and extensive, is also wild, often pathless, and filled with brambles."

The "unpath" through the brambles of the park can lead us through that darkness and into a place of growth.  That is exactly what I am learning--through the experience of homeschooling a gifted child, as well as through this project and its accompanying blog.  Summer has been a time when I've let go of the practice of both, to some degree.  Now--as the Jewish High Holidays come and autumn starts to seem real--is our time to reenter growth: mine, my son's, and the growth we do together.


*If you found this post because of your interest in homeschooling, or if you are fascinated by the experience of having a gifted student at home full time, you might be interested in checking out my 12yo son's blog about his experiences growing up homeschooling: The Education of a Young Man.  As of now, he posts extremely irregularly.  Learning to write is one of his educational goals this year, so things may pick up.

Celebrating Book Bloggers

This post is a day late for the BBAW "Community" celebration day--but for those of you who have stuck with me this long slow summer, you must not be surprised by my tardiness!  As autumn really gets underway, I promise to be a more consistent blogger and reader.

I've been inspired by so many of you that I hardly know where to begin. Some of you write posts full of thoughtful ideas. Some read amazing lists of fabulous fiction, causing me to overload my library hold shelf on a weekly basis. Some of you are stunning writers. All of you make me want to read more books. And sometimes that desire is a disadvantage: too often I pick up another novel rather than pick up this laptop with plans to write a new post!

First of all, thanks to the first book blogger I ever found, Amanda at Dead White Guys. I had been googling to see if anybody wrote about their non-school-based educations and stumbled across her hilarious and clever blog.  Of course, I laughed as I read many of her back posts and then immediately subscribed to her blog and twitter feed.  I do find it a bit ironic that my very first "model" of a classics blog was a brilliant parody of what I had in mind to write.  She mocks overly-earnest readers--but secretly I think she may be one of us herself.

Other classic bloggers I love are Allie at A Literary Odyssey, Rebecca at Rebecca Reads, and Jillian at A Room of One's Own. All three are thoughtful critics who build their posts from a combination of the intellectual and the personal.  Their lovely writing and gentle rigor will completely draw you in.

Amateur Reader over at Wuthering Expectations sets a sometimes-ferocious model for careful reading, heady analysis, sophisticated humor, and patient mentorship.  Emily at Evening All Afternoon, Frances at Nonsuch Book, and Teresa and Jenny at Shelf Love all think creatively, write gorgeously, and bring up issues which leave me thinking for days.

Special thanks go to Lucy at Fictional 100.  Her fascinating book about her beloved fictional friends (the central characters of lasting literature) and her inspiring blog are reason enough to gain her a mention here.  But what I am even more indebted to her for is her unbelievable Twitter support (@Fictional100).  She has asked the right questions, introduced me to thoughtful people, and patted me on the back when I needed it most.

There are so many other blogs I love.  Special mention goes to Thomas at My Porch for giving us a book blog full of insights and analysis but also full of the beautiful stories of everyday life, with real characters living out their own real plots.  PJ Grath gives us something similar--lovely photographs, lots of great book talk, and a deep sense of real life--over at Books in Northport.  Finally, Beverley at Pomo Golightly (a blog I found back in my knit blogger days) keeps me dreaming about a simpler, more honest, and more beautiful world.

Thanks to all of you--and thanks to all the rest of you who read, write, and share your thoughts with me.  You make me a better reader.

Short-listed!

I am honored to announce that the Lifetime Reading Plan was nominated in the category of "Best New Blog" for this year's celebration of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! I would love it if you would hop over there and put in a good word for me. You can vote by clicking at the bottom of the nomination page or at the main voting page.

If you are new to my blog, you might check out some of my favorite posts:

1. Gilgamesh: The Art of Becoming Civilized

2. Trollope's Rachel Ray

3. Waugh's The Loved One

You can also learn more about me and my project here in my introductory post, "Surrounded by Books".

Indexing the Great Books

Mortimer Adler, one of the scholars who compiled the Great Books of the Western World, felt the series needed an index, or (as he called it) a Syntopicon. He chose what he thought were the 102 greatest ideas in the history of the world, then hired recent college graduates--eventually a staff of more than one hundred workers--to sift through the Great Books for any allusions in the texts they could find. Among his "great ideas" were Love, Rhetoric, Time, Truth, and Tyranny.

At the time--and ever since--people have questioned his categories. Some complained that Sex, Money, and Power had been ignored. Although War was a category, Peace was not. And there was a lot more Sin than Virtue.  Even with the limited number of categories, the Syntopicon eventually reached a length of more than 2400 pages, covered by two thick volumes.  A reviewer named Dwight MacDonald wrote a review of what he jokingly called "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club" and trashed the index.  "One has the feeling," he claimed, "of being caught in a Rube Goldberg contraption."

When a reporter saw the above picture, originally printed in Life magazine, he was struck by how much the cards stuck in their boxes resembled headstones--"as though Professor Adler and his associates had come to bury and not to praise Plato and other great men."

You can find more about the process of indexing the Great Books of the Western World in Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, which I reviewed in my last post.

A Great Idea

Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is a very readable account of a what the author calls the very "icons of unreadabliity": the Great Books of the Western World. This fifty-four volume series of classics was developed by scholars at the University of Chicago and was formally launched in the spring of 1952. Although it is hard now to believe, a million households bought the books from door-to-door salesmen with the hope of identifying with a shared intellectual heritage and participating in a national conversation about enduring ideas.

Beam begins his "undidactic history" with Robert Maynard Hutchins, "the 'boy wonder' appointee" to the presidency of the University of Chicago, who put together the Great Books with the help of "his brilliant, Hobbit-like sidekick, Mortimer Adler" (who was "an unholy pain in the neck.")  Although there is much evidence that Hutchins and Adler were genuinely committed to the democratization of the classics, Beam points out their "irrepressible intellectual hucksterism."  He argues that these "Great Bookies" (and the marketers at the press) targeted the insecurities of poorly educated Americans in an effort to sell them expensive sets of books they would never read.  (Want to impress your boss? Want to attract the attention of  a well-educated female?)

Although I enjoyed reading Beam's snarky little book, I remain unconvinced that Hutchins and Adler were primarily motivated by money.  Yes: after the books were published, hucksters carried the volumes from door to door around the country and often lied to clients in order to make a sale.  But Hutchins and Adler were deeply committed to the study of the classics (which they taught both in college classrooms and in the community) from long before the idea of the published series arose.

Beam frequently laughs at people who still seem devoted to these works or even believe that someone would read them.  But he also makes it clear that many of these people are quite genuine in their commitments.  In fact, Beam gets bitten by the classics-reading bug himself.

This is not a book that requires a lot from the reader, nor is it particularly thoughtful.  Beam does not help me come to terms with my own desire to read the canon, nor does he help me comprehend my deep hesitations about this project.  But the history of the publication of this series is an interesting one.

My vote: Skim the library's copy.

Hello? Is this thing on?

This has been a long hot summer.  The oppressive heat of our un-air-conditioned house has left me staring into space rather than reading great books and writing blog posts about them.  When I have deigned to pick up a book, it has often been a light contemporary novel or memoir rather than an ancient classic. Add to that the fact that I was dealing with a personal issue (which is in a much better place) and all the reading it required to understand what was going on.

And now I'm up to my eyeballs planning our 7th grade homeschooling year.  Although we've taken a fairly unschooly approach in the past, following our son's interests and abilities as any given day suggests, this year we plan to be much more focused and directed.  We're trying to decide whether to homeschool through our son's high school years--and I think we need to figure not only how to make sure he is prepared for college work (and that our record keeping is adequate for college admissions) but that we can work together intensely with some semblance of civility and joy.

As we think about the upcoming year, I've read (and reread) some fascinating books about educating children.  An old favorite is David Albert's And the Skylark Sings with Me - Adventures in Homeschooling and Community-Based Education.  I read it just about every August, right before our school year starts.

The story of how Albert's two daughters were educated at home, Skylark is inspiring and thought provoking.  The author seeks to allow his daughters' gifts (and the girls are gifted in different ways) to develop as fully as possible, with as much freedom as possible.  Even within that freedom, the girls develop a deep sense of responsibility, direction, and relatively traditional academic values.  Some of my friends resist the story because they feel that the Albert family is special and the girls are so precocious that his book is unrepresentative.  Others dislike the fact that the book is not a how-to book in any way.  Reading the book this year, I loved it just as much as ever--but I must admit that I was disappointed to remember that the book ends right as his elder daughter reaches the age my son is now.  Although the critics are right to say that readers cannot extrapolate from Albert's story to make specific choices about our own children's education, I have always loved the model of his general approach to homeschooling and child-rearing.  Now that my son seems to have entered a whole new world, I would love to have Albert hold my hand as I grow to understand my own 12yo.

Another book I love is Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.  When I first read the book many years ago, I dreamed of those future years when my son would take control of his own education and become as devoted to learning for learning's sake as Llewellyn clearly is.  In fact, perhaps this is the perfect book to follow Albert's.  Like Albert, Llewellyn is committed to a true life of an active mind combined with radical freedom.  But instead of talking about how parents can foster that freedom-education in their children's lives, she talks directly to teenagers about how they can create it for themselves.

Llewellyn lists all sorts of inspiring and thoughtful idea about things to do, subjects to study, and books to read.  Sometimes, though, some of the suggestions seem a bit too new-agey or too deliberately "deep and meaningful."  A bigger caveat: sometimes the author is so anti-school that I'm turned off, personally.  And that profoundly anti-school attitude makes little sense to youngsters who have been homeschooled from the beginning.

A more traditional academic path is taken by high schooler Kendall Hailey in her memoir The Day I Became an Autodidact.  Because of this book's relevance to my own adult project, I plan to review in much more detail at a later date.

You see what a hippie-nerd I am.  I'm drawn to both child-led freedom education and to the formal rigor of academia.  That combination of commitments is what makes this blog project so appealing for me, what makes these particular books so relevant to my life, and also what makes homeschooling such a great pleasure.

But I do read books that challenge my general approach.  I'd heard vicious accounts of the uber-popular family memoir by Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother--and knew I would hate the author's beliefs about child rearing.  Perhaps partly because I was expecting something so awful, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short book.  I am contemplating getting my son to read this as well, just so he knows how the other half lives.

Rather than believing in child-led education and nurturing freedom, Chua supports what she calls Chinese parenting.  She feels that it is not only a parent's right to force a child to follow a particular path but a parent's responsibility.  Only by pressuring a child to work very hard, she argues, will that child develop into an adult capable of serious dedication and success.  Sometimes she uses blackmail, shame, and other parenting techniques that make me queasy in an effort to get her two talented daughters to develop their gifts. 

What I found persuasive is the author's articulation that requiring more from a child is fundamentally a sign that a parent believes the child is capable of more, of better.  Letting a child get by with a half-hearted attempt at something, or letting a child give up before exerting serious effort, teaches the child that he or she is not capable.  These insights are sprinkled throughout Chua's very funny narrative.  Although she ends the book still supporting "Chinese parenting," the reader sees the author struggle with the limits or problems of her child-reading style.   And throughout, as she recounts those queasiness-inducing parental behaviors I mentioned above, she is self-deprecating and even humble in her own sarcastic way.

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The weather has cooled off here is DC--kind of odd for August, I guess, so probably temporary--and the school year is starting anew.  Time for me to get back to my classics reading!  The next few posts will be discussions of books about books, plus reviews of a few random summer reads I want to mention.  After that: Greek Drama!  Please join me.