Road trip!

By -
I've been trying to decide what books to take on my trip.  We'll be doing a whole lot of driving, so I figure I'll be able to do some reading, but it always works out that you don't read as much as you expect, right?  And it will be my job to keep the driver awake (I won't be doing any of the driving myself, because my co-pilot gets carsick if not actually doing the driving).

Anyway, I haven't read anything Greek lately.  I'd like to take Herodotus but the book is too huge for a road trip.  Euripedes is on my shelf, but in a library book.  Therefore I've decided to take Plato and Aristotle along for company.  Here they are, arguing away.


You can see that Plato is the older one pointing upwards.  Plato believed that ultimate reality was found in ideals, or Forms, that could not be found on earth.  We have the imperfect reflections of Forms here, but somewhere there is an ultimate reality which contains ideal trees and people and furniture.  Aristotle, the younger fellow, disagrees with his tutor and insists that reality exists in material objects that are knowable through experience--so he's gesturing towards the ground.

I have lots of other books I want to take along besides the two of the most foundational philosophers around.  Doctor Zhivago is going along.  I want to take Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, which is on my Back to the Classics list.  I think I will also take a medieval account kept at the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds by a monk named Jocelin of Brakelond.  It looks rather friendlier than most such accounts and is a nice small book.

It's a bit silly to take any paper books along at all, since I have tons of good stuff on my tablet!  I thought my tablet was supposed to make a backpack full of books unnecessary on long trips.  I guess I haven't gotten used to that yet.

Comments

  1. AartiJuly 29, 2012 at 7:55 AM

    Have you considered audiobooks at all for your road trip? Might be a good way to read AND keep the driver awake, if you can agree on a book to read together :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJuly 29, 2012 at 12:58 PM

    Yeah, that whole agreeing on a book thing might be a little tricky! ;) Our tastes are very different. I do have some podcasts and lectures loaded up to listen to, but it might well turn out that she listens to her stuff (country!) while I listen to mine (Oingo Boingo!) a lot of the time.

    We agree on Sarah McLachlan and 80's music, but I can't drive with Sarah on, she's too relaxing.

    And there will be 3 kids in the back of the car!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more