The Nerdy, Wordy, Reading Life
So we had spent the entire day inside. Cooped up, avoiding the cold and damp. Finally we were just too restless, so I dressed the boys up nice and warm, got into jeans and shoes and headed out to the front yard to rake leaves. And the clouds just opened up. We had been outside [...]
Of course Sunday was a busy day as it usually is. This week I did all my weekly baking Sunday afternoon. This meant zucchini bread, amish friendship bread and a pot of minestrone soup, not to mention dinner, all going at once. That means that Monday will be fairly laid back but because of the [...]
We had a great little party. It was not very Halloween-esque but quite fun. Good friends and good conversation. One note, if you invite young men who are neither living at home nor married, I highly recommend having nutritious, filling food on hand. Shepherd’s Pie works well. They will be hungry and you earn a [...]
More Didion made for dense, slow reading! Despite a concentrated effort I only managed to get about 200 pages in. The only thing is, this book is actually a collection of seven books! Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions and Where I Was From. UnfortunatelyI didn’t know that it [...]
I read a lot of books. I read them pretty fast; about 1/2 a book a day. I read them not just as recreation but to learn and understand more. Fortunately reading to learn is not a matter of volume. You can linger over a book for months and ferret out every little detail and [...]
The Stranger by Albert Camus Page: 117 Finished The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston Page:113 The Stranger was a quick and easy read. The bleakness and the heartlessness of the book may have been meant as an indictment of modern life but it seemed more to be a symptom than a diagnosis. [...]
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Page: 272 Another good day for the page count. Yay! I might actually catch up…if this trend continues that is. Ahh…the Stoics. Good old Marcus Aurelius. He is so fascinating to read and important too but he kinda makes me want to go out and indulge in all my favorite parts [...]
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Page: 213 Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz Page: 171 I finished Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist treatise today and found the opening of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy to be a startlingly dissonant note. She insists that women should never be solely dependent on a man for either subsistence or mental [...]
Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov Page: 446 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft Page: 84 I was prepared for Bulgakov’s novel to be “too much” for me. Maybe it’s the rest of the reading I’ve been doing this year, maybe it’s the natural consequence of high expectations, maybe it’s just because [...]
Wealth of Nations Page: 310 You may have noticed that I didn’t get much reading done today. I’m saddened but not surprised. Alex and Luc have been practicing getting up earlier and earlier and I’ve been wanting to sleep later and later. So we started the day on the wrong foot and everyone was in [...]