As the eagle-eyed may have noticed by the suspicious lack of blog posts a couple of times this week, it's been a busy week here at Leaflocker HQ, and a busy week means a lack of the dedicated focused reading time needed to get really dug into the weekly readings. I was left with almost half of the planned pages still to read yesterday morning in order to get this post to you on time, and I didn't quite get there. To be honest, if it hadn't been for the rain interruptions with the cricket you'd have been unlikely to reading this at all.
After bemoaning having to read all the books off of a screen after the loss of my tablet last week, I did the sensible thing and just went the 50 metres across the quad to the college library to read my Plato and Herodotus this time around. Since even the masters students have flown the nest by this point in the year, I had the whole thing completely to myself, apart from the one fellow reader pictured above. He seemed very well-read, but wasn't very forthcoming with him opinions on Plato, so I left him in silence and went about my reading.
The Week That Was:
The History of Herodotus
Book VI
I still can't keep all my various Greek islands straight, but I guess that it's not really important in the long run. Things are heating up between the Greeks and Darius, and after the early sorties this week I think we can be looking forward to some serious fireworks next time around. I still don't know why the Spartans keep listening to the oracle, it's pretty clear to me that the Pythoness just doesn't have their best interests in mind.
The Symposium by Plato
Hey! This is where Aristophanes and his excellent story about how people used to have four feet and are now searching the world for their other halves comes from! I was not expecting that to pop up in the midst of these series of speeches in praise of love.
When we got to the main event of Socrates speech I was feeling pretty uninspired, since to my mind he started off with a pretty poor argument and it felt like he was going to stay on that track the whole time, but thankfully he moved on, and the argument about love as a creative force is an interesting idea indeed. Overall, I think this was the best of the Plato that we've read so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he has for us next time we revisit him.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Chapters XVI
Defoe is actually pretty good at action scenes, which came as a bit of surprise to me after so much of the action up to this point happening inside Crusoe's head. The attack on the cannibals that Crusoe has been fantasising about on and off for seemingly half the book so far finally happens, and with three to twenty-one numbers, the element of surprise carries the day. Reading the book digitally means I'm not completely sure, but we must be heading towards the end now, and while it's been a good time, I think we've probably experienced everything that Crusoe has to offer.
Of Discourse by Francis Bacon
Another good one from Bacon. He seems to have his priorities in the right place, in this case his point is mostly that it's better to make conversation than to hold court and impress everyone with how eloquent you are. Normally I commend Bacon for his brevity, and while his packed a lot into one page, on this occasion I think he could probably just put the whole thing in a tweet.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Volume III - Book I
After spending a couple of weeks complaining about the detailed descriptions of a throw-away house during the last volume, we open this one by returning to the house after all. Maybe I need to give Hugo more credit. That said, it still seems unlikely that we really need to know the detailed history and layout of the house, no matter who lives there, but let's wait and see.
The title 'Paris studied in its atom' didn't exactly fill me with confidence for there being a lot of plot development in today's reading, and indeed there wasn't any, but it was an enjoyable read. Hugo's detailed, passionate descriptions of the city are really something. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris indeed.
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Chapters XII-XIII
So we come to the employment of Mr. Weller. It's got to be a change for the Weller, too, as it's just not Dicken's unless one of the characters in each scene talks with a weird accent #punachieved. I can't say that I got a whole lot out of Pickwick this time around, it mostly just washed past me, but hey, there's a lot of chapters and they can't all be winners.
Some Numbers:
This week we passed the 1000 pages of the Great Books of the Western World series read. We also passed 100 pages of philosophy and theology dialogues spread over six different titles, 5 of which are the various Platonic works that we've finished. But never fear, there's plenty more where that came from, as we still have eight Platonic dialogues to get through, not counting the twelve that we discarded during the great notoriety cull at the beginning of the project.
Pages last week: 114Pages so far: 2803
Readings for Week XXV:
Thanks to an absolutely gargantuan reading from the Histories, we're left with just enough room for three other titles to keep it company. Alongside excerpts from Defoe and Hugo we're going to take a risk and have a shot at George Santayana's Lucretius, because at some point we have to tackle Lucretius anyways, and also because Santayana famously said that thing about the past and being condemned to relive it. You'd have thought after the Emerson debacle I'd have learnt about picking books just on a pithy quote or two from the author, but I guess I have always been slow to learn, and I'm not going to change the habit of a lifetime after just one somewhat perplexing dive into modernism.
Dr. J, whose reading plan I am using as my starting line, also read D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner, but he didn't have Sons and Lovers on his list like we do on ours, so I figure we can skip this one and hold out for the main event. It's a busy enough week as it is.
Dr. J, whose reading plan I am using as my starting line, also read D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner, but he didn't have Sons and Lovers on his list like we do on ours, so I figure we can skip this one and hold out for the main event. It's a busy enough week as it is.
The History of Herodotus
Book VII (56 pages)
#gbbw #manandsociety #history #greek
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Chapter XVII (10 pages)
#ggb #imaginativeliterature #novel #english
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Volume III - Books II-III (28 pages)
#non_gbww #imaginativeliterature #novel #french
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