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So I've wandered off the UW literary reservation (with all the reading I need to be doing for that, you can ask yourself why I would do this -- lord knows I have) and been reading some things I've just flatly been enjoying.
The first is the Odyssey. Yes, it is for class. Yes, I've read it before. That's okay. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoy it -- far more than the Iliad (and way more than Gilgamesh... not even in the ballpark). That's okay. I'm just having fun reading it, class or not. I get to do a small casual report on Book 23, in which Odysseus and Penelope are reunited. It's pretty cool. :)
The second is The Imprisoned Guest. It's about Laura Bridgman, the "original" educated American deaf-mute. As an adult, she taught finger spelling to Anne Sullivan, who went on to teach Helen Keller. In herself, she was the pupil of Samuel Howe, who was a hero of the Greek Revolution and who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachutsetts (and was married to Julia Ward Howe). It's a very sort of Enlightenment tale (both in time period and philosophy) and thus far it's holding my attention pretty well.
The third is Stranger in a Strange Land. I had managed to avoid entangling myself with Heinlein as much through apathy as any set effort, but it has been shown to me of late that a number of the people I'm terribly fond of list this as one of the top three core texts that influenced their lives. With recommendations like that, how can I not read it? I'm not going to spend a lot of time discussing it here right now -- there's too much and I'm not far enough into it to really have a sense of the text as a whole. I can see it marks in those friends, though, in different ways. Very interesting. I'll say more about it later.
The first is the Odyssey. Yes, it is for class. Yes, I've read it before. That's okay. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoy it -- far more than the Iliad (and way more than Gilgamesh... not even in the ballpark). That's okay. I'm just having fun reading it, class or not. I get to do a small casual report on Book 23, in which Odysseus and Penelope are reunited. It's pretty cool. :)
The second is The Imprisoned Guest. It's about Laura Bridgman, the "original" educated American deaf-mute. As an adult, she taught finger spelling to Anne Sullivan, who went on to teach Helen Keller. In herself, she was the pupil of Samuel Howe, who was a hero of the Greek Revolution and who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachutsetts (and was married to Julia Ward Howe). It's a very sort of Enlightenment tale (both in time period and philosophy) and thus far it's holding my attention pretty well.
The third is Stranger in a Strange Land. I had managed to avoid entangling myself with Heinlein as much through apathy as any set effort, but it has been shown to me of late that a number of the people I'm terribly fond of list this as one of the top three core texts that influenced their lives. With recommendations like that, how can I not read it? I'm not going to spend a lot of time discussing it here right now -- there's too much and I'm not far enough into it to really have a sense of the text as a whole. I can see it marks in those friends, though, in different ways. Very interesting. I'll say more about it later.
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Date: 2010-02-20 04:42 am (UTC)From:Waiting is, after all. :)
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Date: 2010-02-20 07:50 am (UTC)From:HULK SMASH! I will agree to disagree with you between the Odyssey and Gilgamesh. Yes there are men turned into pigs, and chicks who'll do naughty things to you (just not apparently in any sort of pleasant way). But Gilgamesh is deep. Really deep! And I just found it more meaningful (to me) than a lot of other books.