Campus is Moving Again

It is time for Percival Blakeney Academy to pull up stakes and travel to a new campus location. It looks like the great powers that be have decided that it is time my kids actually spend some of their school years in the mainland United States. So once again it is time to clean all the cupboards, make massive trips to the trift store and make sure all the professional books are properly marked.

I will only be doing light blogging until we're resettled, sometime after the new year. I would promise to catalog our re-entry and holiday celebrations, but I'm cutting back a lot of my responsibilities and blogging is going to be one of them until I've taken care of essentials like packing up one home and finding another.

However, I do reserve the right to drop in and post some fun pictures of our travels in Japan and Europe that I've never gotten around to chronicling. I just don't promise that they'll be in any sort of order other than because I felt like it.

Why Study Literature?

There are times when it feels like I'm really swimming upstream with the amount of reading I want my kids to be doing in school. And from the posts people make here about feeling out of place around workbook orriented homeschoolers or unschoolers, I'm probably not alone.

I just read the best book review, 1648 and All That by Roger Kimball, which is a review of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill (the review, alas, is for NR subscribers only). The review would be well worth finding a library copy of the Sept 20 edition of National Review.

Since I can't link to the full review, here are some snippets.

After asking what you should look for in a well qualified diplomat, Kimball lists several attributes, then continues,

How about a deep acquaintance with the mountain peaks of literature, from Homer, Aeschylus, and Thucydides through Montaigne, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Milton, and Lock, and on to Madison, Schiller, Dickens, Bismarck, Dostoevsky, Kipling, and Hermann Broch?

[ snip]

...this last qualification may be as important as all the rest, not least because, if truly accomplished, it argues possession of brains, discretion, etc.

[snip]

The questions "What kind of society should we endeavor to make?" cannot be answered, cannot even be seriously entertained, in the absence of the questions "Who are we?" and "What do we want?" And those questions, Hill argues, have been entertained in the most sustained and penetrating way in imaginative literature - understanding "literature" in the large sense that embraces the works of philosophers and historians as well as novelists and poets. In brief, as Hill writes in his prologue, "statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight."

at the end of the review, Kimball has a long quotation from Henry Kissinger:

We have entered a time of total change in human consciousness of how people look at the world. Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. You have to come to grips with who you are. A leader needs these qualities. But now we learn from fragments of facts....Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface. This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order impossible to achieve.

I could cheerfully go on listing all the other parts of the review that I especially enjoyed, but I probably would end up retyping the whole thing. You'd really be better off to just get a subscription to National Review so you could enjoy this sort of writing all the time. So let's just say it struck a chord, especially in my current circumstances.

Yesterday I was on the phone with the supervisor of the local personal property office trying to explain to him that we really in fact did actually have thousands of books that fell into military professional gear because of the areas that my husband works with. I always find it so amazing that there is no problem thinking of a specially fitted flight helmet as pro gear, or musical instruments as pro gear for a member of one of the Navy bands, or of medical or legal books for a military doctor or lawyer. But as soon as a more generalist military officer starts to amass a library of much beyone the Navy reading list and Fleet Tactics you get weird looks.

I've had packers threaten to quit over how many books they were having to pack. I've had moving inspectors tell me that they'd never seen so many books in their entire military and civilian career scheduling moves. It gets so tiring to seem like a freak, because we think that the world of literature and non-ficiton writing has some purpose beyond the NY Times best seller list.

I've read (and less often heard) Christians objecting to reading anything that was fiction (while still somehow making an exception for the Left Behind series and whatever else was on the end cap display at their local chain Christian bookstore). And this is hardly a new problem. The introduction to Pilgrim's Progress is Bunyan begging forgiveness and indulgence for his daring to write a piece of fiction in the hope that it might enlighten and encourage.

Anyway, I'll be clipping Kimball's essay for future encouragement. If you can get ahold of the 20 Sep edition of National Review, you should look up the review (pg 50). And it encourages me to pull out my copy of Pilgrim's Progress and start tackling the Well Educated Mind reading list again.

Books Read in 2010

I fell off the wagon on recording books read in 2009, even though I did keep reading. This year I'm going to copy Palm Tree Pundit's habit of separating the running book tally and comments on what I read. Should make keeping the list going a bit less onerous.

January
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Pocketful of Pinecones - Karen Andreola (One of the few fiction books about homeschooling. Highlights the joys of Charlotte Mason style education and nature study)
Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (Book 5 of the Aubrey-Maturin series)
The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (Book 6 of the Aubrey-Maturin series) NB: DH found that this series was mentioned as good reading by Adm Stavridis in Destroyer Captain, a short book about leadership and command that DH recently enjoyed.
Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede
At All Costs - David Weber (book 11 of the Honor Harrington series)
Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
The Grand Tour - Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (Fun book. If you like Harry Potter AND Jane Austen, you should give this series a try.)

February
The Mislaid Magician - Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (You can skip this. Most of what made it enjoyable was the improbability of Austen's work in such a setting. But he didn't completely pull it off. Just read the original. Really, you're up to it.)

March
The Lightening Thief - Rick Riordan
Tomb of the Golden Bird - Elizabeth Peters (from the Amelia Peabody series. I also really enjoyed Red Land, Black Land, written under her real name Barbara Mertz.)
Sea of Monsters - Rick Riordan
The Christmas Train - David Baldacci (recommendation from my mil, very nice.)
Saving Darwin - Karl Giberson (I'll have to mull this one over for a bit. More of a history of the science of evolution and the conflicts over it. It is a very good history of the conflict. But I was looking for a bit more of a creed to consider.)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein (Read this many years ago. Good representation of Heinlein's libertarian bent, the book is credited with popularizing the phrase TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. However, it also has features some of his libertarian views on marriage customs.)
Persuassion - Jane Austen (Still one of my favorites.)

April
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen (Very different from her other books, quite funny)
The Titan's Curse - Rick Riorday
The Big Four - Agatha Christie
The Bordeaux Betrayal - Ellen Crosby
Kris Longknife: Undaunted - Mike Shepherd
The Road to Serfdom - Hayek (Great book. Worth the four months that it took to absorb it.)

May
After the Hangover - R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (Read to review; not a favorite.)
Bird by Bird - Anne Lamont
Lessons at Blackberry Inn - Karen Andreola (I liked this.)
God King - Joanne Williamson
The Last Olympian - Rick Riordan
My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes (This was a new author for me. I'm looking forward to reading more.)
King's Fool - Margaret Campbell Barnes

June
I thought about only recording the worthy books and not the light summer reading that I've been grabbing for park benches and train rides. But then I'd like to see what my reading patterns really are, not just scrub for the highlights.

Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist - Rod Englert
Crystal Singer, Crystal Lines and Killashandra - Anne McCaffery (Not as good as when I'd read them the first time.)
Big Jack - J. D. Robb
High Noon - Nora Roberts
Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie

July
More summer reading
Remembered Death - Agatha Christie
Love on a Dime - Cara Lynn James
Towards Zero - Agatha Christie (I was a bit disappointed because I'd guessed the murderer about half way through. Then she shook up the plot, and it turned out that I was totally wrong.)
Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie
Blind Trust - Terri Blackstone (What you'd expect from a paperback romance. But I was intrigued by the fact that she'd started out as a romance writer, grown disillusioned with how far she'd strayed from Christianity in her writing and left that particular branch of publishing. Then had her early books' copyrights returned to her. This book is not just a republishing, but a rewrite of the story as she wished she'd written it the first time.)
About Time - Jack Finney (Short stories about time. Some of the finest writing I've read in ages.)
Planet of the Apes - Pierre Boulle (I was surprised to see that he was also the author of The Bridge over the River Kwai. But the original novel was as much about the nature of humanity and the effects of imprisonment as about a rise of apes. Don't mistake this for the novelization of the movie remake, which was some of the worst writing I've laid hands on. I couldn't make it through the first chapter of that hash, which was a novelization of a remake of a movie of a book. There wasn't much soul left. But the original story makes me want to go back and watch the 1960's movie and see how it holds up.)
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks. (You'll have to just trust me on this one. It really isn't about gore. There isn't even the sort of story arch that you would expect from a novel. It's more of an exploration of how different societies would deal with an epic disaster. Where do the strengths and weaknesses of a culture lie and what hard decisions would have to be made.)
Digital Barbarism - Mark Helprin (Really an excellent book that is more about the nature of a life lived well than just copyrights.)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss (A fun little book about punctuation. Full of sadly humorous examples of why punctuation matters. It will make you want to attend your punctuating, even while texting. Might even make you reconsider emoticons and embrace the semi colon.)
A Presumption of Death - Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paxton Walsh
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J. K. Rowling
The Return of Philo T. McGiffin - David Poyer (A novel about the Naval Academy. Crackin' good yarn.)

August
Brief Gaudy Night - Margaret Campbell Barnes (a story of Anne Boleyn)
This wasn't much of a month for deep reading. I read many chapters of several books, but completed few of them. Some of this was because I was skimming several books to get ready for the school year.

Note: I found last year that I stopped updating my reading around midsummer. This year I'm having a similar struggle. Maybe I just read more in cold months. Or perhaps the summer lends itself to browsing. I found myself reading parts of books much more than entire volumes. Or maybe it was just the mental stress of trying to sustain summer activities and plan for the school year. In any event, I did still read a lot in June - August, but not a lot to log here.

September
Cordelia's Honor - Lois Bujold
I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles - Lily Burana
Dragongirl - Todd McCaffery (He should spend some more time reading his mom's books and thinking about why they work, and why this book just doesn't.)
Summer on Blossom Street - Debbie Macomber (Follows the formula of her other Blossom Street books and it's no big surprise that there are happy endings all around. But I cared about the characters and felt satisfied with the hours invested, quite unlike the experience with Dragongirl.)

October
Summer at Fairacre - Miss Read (This author has long been recommended. Worth reading.)
Writing and Selling Science Fiction - The Science Fiction Writers of America (Getting ready for some intensive writing for NaNoWriMo [also known as proof that I've taken leave of my senses]. Most of the chapters were very good and helpful in a concrete way, vice the esoteric and meditative advice in many writing books. Maybe you won't have a bug eyed monster in your story, but the nosey neighbor down the street still has to ring true to be convincing. And I appreciate that the authors included are actually sucessful, published authors rather than people I've never heard of.)
One Corpse Too Many - Ellis Peters (I read this series many years ago. Nice to see that they still hold up. Brilliant writing that doesn't feel out of date. If you like Sayers or Austen, you should give this a whirl. I've long had a dream of spending a week in a beach rental in the winter with a stack of the whole series at hand. With hot drinks and hot soup, this would be an ideal vacation.)
The Virgin in the Ice - Ellis Peters
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell (Intriguing book about why things catch on. It would be interesting to talk to him about homeschooling.)
Housing Boom and Bust - Thomas Sowell (Really good write up of the many bad decisions that led to the housing crisis.)
A Civil Campaign - Lois Bujold (I read this one last year, twice. And it was just as entertaining the third time, maybe even more so since I've since read the earlier books in the series. Not many stories I can say that about.)
The Heretic's Apprentice - Ellis Peters

November
The Summer of the Danes - Ellis Peters
Mission of Honor - David Webber (The Honorverse may have gotten a little to unwieldy.)
In the Presence of Mine Enemies - Harry Turtledove (Well done alternate history of Germania victorious.)
Nine Tailors - Dorothy Sayers (Maybe my third time through, but I still like reading her over and over.)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling (I reread this after we saw the movie. I think I actually enjoyed it more this second time than I did when I read it the weekend that the book was first released. I wasn't rushing to the end to see what happened, so I was able to more savor what was happening.)

December
Clouds of Witness - Dorothy Sayers (Another repeat.)
Dunkirk Crescendo - Bodie and Brock Thoene (A "director's cut" of Twilight of Courage. An amusing read for being stuck in an empty apartment.)

I didn't set out to try to read a book a week or a book from a bunch of different genres. I actually mentioned book reading challenges to my husband last year and he observed that he really didn't need to make reading into an obligation that he was then failing at. I have to admit that I agree.

My reading isn't constant through the year. It ebbs and flows according to our level of busyness. I got a lot of reading done on bus trips and sitting around at soccer practice. But the end of summer found me reading more magazines and websites and chapters of books that entire titles. But in the end I've already read seventy-one books and I still have a few weeks before the end of the year, with at least one flight and one long drive that present possible reading time. And of course there is the public library book sale on the 22nd...