I finished The Mauritius Command, which was very satisfying. I think his writing is improving with each book, which is always a desirable quality in an author if he or she can manage it (Michael Connolly comes to mind). The personality of Dr. Maturin continues to deepen, the description of Jack as a married man [...]
Archive for November, 2007
Aubrey/Maturin IV
Posted in Patrick O'Brian, books on November 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
More on the Iliad
Posted in Teaching Company, The New Yorker, books on November 21, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I am really struggling to understand The Iliad, or piece together the bits I have gleaned into something comprehensive. What I got out of it was that Homer was trying to point the way to wisdom, to help mortals understand a tiny bit of the ways of the gods—or at least to realize how subjective [...]
Thanksgiving Salad
Posted in Recipes on November 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I don’t know about you, but I like something green on the table at Thanksgiving; this salad has a light, citrusy dressing to balance a heavy meal.
Pear Salad: I use a mixture of arugula, spinach, red-leaf lettuce with sliced red onion. Chop up 1 or 2 firm-ripe bosc pears and add to the greens. For the dressing, [...]
Hubris
Posted in Teaching Company, books on November 20, 2007 | 1 Comment »
In the first literature class I took at community college (where I was an accounting major), we read Oedipus Rex and were introduced to the concept of hubris — “overweening pride against the gods,” in the words of my professor. Naturally, hubris comes up in The Iliad, with a much more thorough definition. According to [...]
The lessons of the Iliad
Posted in Teaching Company, books on November 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve listened to the Iliad lectures at least five times now and am still trying to grasp the enormity of it all. Fears lays out many, often overlapping, lessons and themes from the book. For instance, the great lesson is that learned by Achilles, that one should be moderate in the pursuit of one’s values. [...]
Reading The Iliad
Posted in Teaching Company, books on November 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I finished the Iliad; and I’m quite glad that after some false starts over the past decade I finally did it, and I enjoyed it. More than that, it changed my life (more to follow on this). First of all, two things helped me finally conquer this classic: 1) the motivation and context provided by [...]
Reading connections
Posted in Poetry, Teaching Company on November 16, 2007 | 1 Comment »
I love the game of literary references, how one thing leads to another, for instance, I had never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer before my TeachCo course. I read the New Yorker cover-to-cover (well, almost) every week. So, in a recent issue (in October?), there was a reference to Bonhoeffer in a letter from a reader. [...]
Random reading remarks
Posted in Patrick O'Brian, Teaching Company on November 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Thanks to the TeachCo lecture (“Books that Have Made History; Books that Can Change your Life”), I am awash in books. I am up to Book 18 in the Iliad (Fitzgerald translation, which I’m finding pretty readable). I’m also perusing The Bhagavad Gita (Sky Light Illuminations edition, translated by Shri Purohit Swami) as well as [...]
Which Iliad?
Posted in Teaching Company, books on November 3, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I’m already bogged down in my Teaching Company course because of the compulsion to read the books which Professor Fears is discussing. I’ve ordered Bonhoeffer’s book from the library and I picked up the Iliad from my own bookshelf. I’ve tried reading it before and was overwhelmed by the sea of prose, the mind-numbing lists of [...]
