Thomas Jefferson Education a book a week for the next year discussion

I just finished the lat book in a lame series by Terry Brooks. Not much imagination, very depressing, everybody dies...really lame. Do not read Witch Wraith. I was trying to find a new sci-fi love but this sure wasn't it!

I am back to reading a chapter a week of The Real George Washington. I want to absorb it and write notes in it, not just breeze through it to mark it off my list. I'm on chapter 11.

I am now picking up Princess Academy because I realized my daughter asked me to read it some time ago and I forgot. So that will be my fun read.

Next I am debating between Education of a Wandering Man and Les Miserables. Can't decide yet.

I need to proof read better.."last book"

"Next I am debating between Education of a Wandering Man and Les Miserables. Can't decide yet."

Both are on my to-read list! I just finished Silence, by Shusaku Endo. I didn't enjoy it but it was very thought provoking. A friend of mine is doing a Lucy Maud Montgomery reading challenge in January so I'll be reading one of her books next but can't pick which! I've read all of the Anne books and a couple of other titles. I think I'll see if my library owns any titles I haven't read yet.

Just finished "Necessary Lies". Not fantastic, but good enough. Now time to finish "What Do You Really Want For Your Children?" by Wayne Dyer. I try to alternate fiction and non-fiction.

I'm rereading The Odyssey. I loved it in high school, and actually got a lot out of it, so hopefully I can muster through with momma brain. It's been awhile since I've read anything with harder language.

Celeste wrote: "I just finished the lat book in a lame series by Terry Brooks. Not much imagination, very depressing, everybody dies...really lame. Do not read Witch Wraith. I was trying to find a new sci-fi love ..."

The Real George Washington changed my feelings about him forever. Although there were many key individuals in the American founding and they were all indispensable, we can still safely say: without George Washington there would be no United States of America.

I'm reading a few books, including A Thomas Jefferson Education (for the 2nd time), Parenting a House United, and The Reading Promise. I just finished The Kitchen House. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with it. It was very disturbing in a lot of ways but very insightful in others. I am glad to be done with it, though!

Trying to finish off a whole lot of stuff I started last year.

Paris to the Pyrenees (a travel book).

Jane Eyre (which I started for MiC). I've read it before many times. Love the writing etcetera but got bogged down this time.

Turn the Page (read it last year but its this months miC)

Think like Da Vinci. Yes and no. Sometimes the authors worldview gets in the way.

Got to finish Constructing the universe stuck somewhere in the number 5. And I need to go back and do some of the exercises.

A couple of others sitting on my half finished pile. All too heavy for the summer. I need something fun to read.

I feel like I am in a "tying up loose ends" stage right now. I have a lot books in the hopper which is very fulfilling but also slowing down my book by book progress. I am still trying to adjust to the slower speed at which I am reading the individual texts but I am loving the interplay between them. Last week, for example, I had a "dragon day". I did not intend to study dragons, but they were everywhere.

First, I was reading JRR Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (Birzer) with this passage:
"Beowulf, Tolkien had argued, is as important for the historian and the theologian as for the English teacher. Two things should immediately prove this, he thought. First the story contains a dragon. Rarely in literature does one find them. Contrary to our popular memory of legends, no 'wilderness of dragons' abounded in medieval literature. Instead, when such a beastial worm does present itself, the critic should take its significance to the story and its symbolism seriously. Indeed, the appearance of a dragon signifies a number of things - most of them evil. A dragon personifies 'malice, greed, destruction'." (Birzer, p. 36)

Then... I open up Turn The Page and what do I stumble upon almost instantly?

"As JRR Tolkien wrote in The Hobbit, 'It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you life near him.'" (p.34)
I laughed out loud. Suddenly that dragon had more meaning to me because I knew him already from Tolkien's assessment of Beowulf.
(And... eerily, one reference is on page 36 and the other is on page 34.)

Likewise, each of those books also quoted Lewis and Tolkien about fairy myths and how inexpressible they are and yet how central they are to our authentic living. At the same time, I was reading CS Lewis's take on George MacDonald which said the very same thing.

Then, when my husband and I sat down to watch The Librarians... the episode was all about dragons waking up.

I love it when many pots are boiling at the same time and I get to see connections.

So, right now, my stove is simmering the following:
The Lamb's Supper, Scott Hahn
Scarlet (Book 2 of the King Raven series), Stephen Lawhead
Turn the Page (for MIC)
The Out of Sync Child
Philosophy and the Fun of Algebra, Mary Everest Boole
JRR Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer
How The West Was Won, Louis L'Amour
George MacDonald, CS Lewis

More than halfway through January...

Progress anyone?

So far I have read a book a week with about 5 long-term reads in progress, like scriptures.

I started a new fantasy series only to find out is was too smutty. Disappointing. It seems so many books are adding the smut in to all genres making it hard to find something wholesome anymore.

I am starting Education of a Wandering Man, which I hear is very good. Still reading a chapter a week of the Real Thomas Jefferson, which I love.

So far, I've finished 6 books, although most of them I had already started last year. Working on finishing "Momnipotent", and a collection of short stories called "Infinite Space, Infinite God" - I will probably finish that in the next week as we are headed out on a vacation for 10 days and it is on my kindle. Reading my girls "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" because I wanted a read aloud on my kindle, and I have lots of Oz books I've been meaning to read. My oldest is listening to a radio drama of Ben Hur, which got me interested, so I downloaded the novel on my Kindle, and think I might start that one while on vacation. Not sure how much reading time I will do yet :)

I'm reading Harold Lamb's March of the Barbarians. Pretty unbelievable history. Not for immature youth. Check it out! I have set aside 'How to Be a Christian in a Brave New World' by Joni Eareckson Tada (read about 1/3) and will pick it up again when I finish Lamb's which is taking my full attention.

End of the first week of February. I find myself reading books about teaching when I don't have a class or a relief teaching position (for Americans read Substitute).
So I start adding things to what I do with my youngest who now goes to school. Three quarters of the way through Mechanically Inclined (about teaching Grammar) I find myself spotting awesome similies and metaphors in Hating Alison Ashley as we read aloud.
"Only a fool would choose to hang around when volcanoes are about to erupt." (Erica says about her teacher)
I plod through Turn the Page. Not because it isn't good, it is. I have read it not that long ago and the brain wants something else. So much of what I'm reading at the moment is heavy. I just want to run away from it and so does my brain. Struggling to finish things.

I'm reading A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains and enjoying it!