Kenia’s Comments (group member since Apr 12, 2016)

Kenia’s comments from the Reading Classics, Chronologically Through the Ages group.

I have not yet read Anna Karenina, but a friend of mine was highly recommending that when I do, I should read the Rosemary Edmonds translation (which is only available through Amazon U.K). I figured I'd offer it up as another option in addition to Cleo's recommendation. Good luck Taylor!

Wow, I've been out of the loop with this group for a while, because I'm just now seeing this thread!

Anyway, I LOVE this work. I read it a couple years ago with my philosophy Meetup group, and wrote up a short review/essay/overview on my website: http://www.keniasedler.com/lucretius-...

Elizabeth, I look forward to your list.

Elizabeth, that's amazing!! I have more of these SF classics' worlds yet to explore... Except recently I was distracted by more "new & shiny" reads, namely NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy ever since she won the Hugo for best novel for every book in the series (2016, 2017, & 2018), a historical first!

Of all those I have only heard of Mary Shelley (which I find sad), and Frankenstein is actually one of my all-time favorite novels.

Thank you for throwing out more names for us all to consider making part of our reading persuits!

I totally hear you on the gender aspect. In fact, I had to look up the two women you mentioned as I have never heard of them! And I'll bet money that the reason I haven't heard of them isn't because their works aren't great, but because their works are considered inferior solely because the authors are women.
I'll now be adding them to my reading list--thanks!!

Have you heard of the Nart Sagas? They are a collection of myth stories from the various people of he Caucasus region and are believed to have been handed down from the ancient steppe tribes such as the Sythians and the Saka. I have recently purchased the collection edited by John Colarusso. The cultures from which they spring are known for holding women in high regard, and the myths place then in positions of authority, such as sources of wisdom and as warriors.

Hey Deanna! So what I did was go to the St. John’s College website and pull the seminar reading lists/curriculums from both their Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. I also pulled from both of their western as well as eastern classics lists. I didn’t follow them exactly, but those lists were the foundation I started from when creating a “philosophy” category.

I hope that helps! :-)

I don’t know that I’ve heard of Edx before. (I’m not really in the know-how for MOOCs.) Fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing.

Ah, yes. I had trouble with this one. I couldn’t seem to find any book that simply printed out his paradoxes, so I eventually opted to purchase an essay anthology on Zeno’s Paradoxes contributed to by various leading philosophers. The book is simply called “Zeno’s Paradoxes” and it is edited by Wesley C. Salmon. I’m curious to hear what you end up choosing.

Hello Everyone!

I began this group about two years ago, and it's been such an amazing experience to meet fellow-minded readers who love reading classics at least as much as I do, and many times, even more. I plan to continue to read TWEM books and stay active in both this group and on GoodReads in general, but after some thought I've decided to pass on the leadership baton. I have other projects--mainly writing a novel--taking up a lot of time I would normally devote to reading, and so I've calculated that I will be unable to keep up. (I know...I realize that I myself was the one to just recently updated the reading schedule to a more aggressive pace of one book a month; but I forced myself to sit down and think this through realistically, and I wouldn't even be able to keep up with a more modest pace.) And what kind of group moderator doesn't read her own group's books along with everyone else??

So, without further ado, Kendra has been gracious enough to accept primary moderator status. :-D Over the next few weeks, she'll begin to take over running the show.

Thank you Kendra! I look forward to seeing how the group continues to grow and unfold with you steering things along.

Cheers!
Kenia

And we're onto Aristotle's Poetics now!

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) is a much-disdained book. So unpoetic a soul as Aristotle's has no business speaking about such a topic, much less telling poets how to go about their business. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, the story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it. Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, who carried it all over the world. In his Rhetoric (III, xvi, 9), Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the intellect, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logikôs, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusikôs, naturally or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own. Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker."

Welcome Darren! Thanks for joining us!

Mike, that is an excellent suggestion! Thank you for sharing that—I do believe I’ll read it in that manner.

Kendra,

Reading Plato in Athens?! How exciting, indeed! You’ll have to tell us all about it. :-D

Hello Classic-Book-Loving Friends! It's a new month, which means we're on to our next read!

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Plato’s Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as a virtue of a human being. Socrates is finally close to answering the question after he characterizes justice as a personal virtue at the end of Book Four, but he is interrupted and challenged to defend some of the more controversial features of the good city he has sketched. In Books Five through Seven, he addresses this challenge, arguing (in effect) that the just city and the just human being as he has sketched them are in fact good and are in principle possible. After this long digression, Socrates in Books Eight and Nine finally delivers three “proofs” that it is always better to be just than unjust. Then, because Socrates wants not only to show that it is always better to be just but also to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus of this point, and because Socrates’ proofs are opposed by the teachings of poets, he bolsters his case in Book Ten by indicting the poets’ claims to represent the truth and by offering a new myth that is consonant with his proofs.

As this overview makes clear, the center of Plato’s Republic is a contribution to ethics: a discussion of what the virtue justice is and why a person should be just. Yet because Socrates links his discussion of personal justice to an account of justice in the city and makes claims about how good and bad cities are arranged, the Republic sustains reflections on political questions, as well. Not that ethics and politics exhaust the concerns of the Republic. The account in Books Five through Seven of how a just city and a just person are in principle possible is an account of how knowledge can rule, which includes discussion of what knowledge and its objects are. Moreover, the indictment of the poets involves a wide-ranging discussion of art..."

I look forward to everyone's thoughts as the month progresses.

Happy reading!

Welcome to the group, Mike! Feel free to comment on any of the book threads at anytime you’d like. We have an “official” schedule, but all topics are always open for comment, even if it’s something we read months ago!

Thanks for the encouragement Kendra! It seems The Landmark editions are a wise choice for these works. I have the Oxford press edition of Herodotus, but I’m glad I’ve purchased The Landmark edition for Thucydides. It really does seem essential to have the maps immediately adjacent to the text!

I confess I am still struggling to get through Herodotus at a reasonable pace, to then begin Thucydides. I've been timing myself, and it takes me ~6 minutes per page! And this is because every other sentence or so I need to look at the maps in the Appendix to orient myself in order to understand what Herodotus is describing, or taking a detour to read the Notes. These geography-intensive histories take 3x the amount of time a book normally takes for me.

The good thing is that I do find I enjoy reading Herodotus now that I'm used to his style. But I'm going to take a new approach:

I've decided to divvy up the total Herodotus + Thucydides page count across the rest of 2018. If I have an exact goal for # of pages to read each week, I think I'll actually succeed (as opposed to the, "reading what I can, when I can" approach).

The other reason for doing this, even though Thucydides is scheduled for us to finish up this month, is that I'd rather fall behind on these 2 books and stay on track with the rest of our group's schedule, rather than insisting on finishing these first and falling into a domino effect, being perpetually late on every other book this year.

Wish me luck. I hope others are faring better than me! lol

Question: does anyone have any recommendations for reading up on the historicity of Troy? I’m looking to familiarize myself with the general archeological evidence and other scholarship available, but from a high-level perspective (in other words, no more than 1 or 2 books on the topic to give me a big picture view on everything in general).

Kendra wrote: "I plan to join in April. I'm wrapping up Herodotus this month, but I'll jump into Thucydides right after that. I've learned with these large history tomes that you just kind of have to power through!"

My plan is the same! I have a few pages left to finish Book 4 in Herodotus. Starting next week I plan to power through it to finish (I have a short philosophy book I need to prioritize this weekend for a book discussion on the 22nd). Then I'll start Thucydides in April.
I'm right there with you Kendra! :-D