I read from a lot of books, but did not read a great volume of any of them.
Books I am reading for book groups:
Origin of Species
I started reading this yesterday for February in the Great Conversation reading group.
So far, so good. Darwin compares breeding variations of domesticated animals with the relatively narrow variation of species in the wild. Latest highlight:
When, on the one hand, we see domesticated animals and plants, though often weak and sickly, yet breeding quite freely under confinement; and when, on the other hand, we see individuals, though taken young from a state of nature, perfectly tamed, long-lived, and healthy (of which I could give numerous instances), yet having their reproductive system so seriously affected by unperceived causes as to fail in acting, we need not be surprised at this system, when it does act under confinement, acting not quite regularly, and producing offspring not perfectly like their parents or variable.
Mind, Reason and Being in the World
I am about 2/3 through this one after reading through most of January. It varies between quite readable and pretty much over my head. Latest highlight:
What can outlive the experience, of course, is the concrete state of affairs: the pig actually being under the oak. Could this be what is given to the subject? Maybe; but not according to the standard intentionalist account. This is because, for the standard intentionalist, what is given is something that can be true or false. But the pig being under the oak is not something that can be true or false. It is just something that is there. Nor is it something from which things follow. Things follow from truths or propositions; the pig being in the garden is not a truth or a proposition, but something in the world. And things in the world are not true or false. So we have to distinguish between the propositional content of an experience, and what is phenomenologically given to the subject.
Being and Time
Latest highlight:
When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside the entity to be known, and determines its character; but even in this ‘Being-outside’ alongside the object, Dasein is still ‘inside’, if we understand this in the correct sense; that is to say, it is itself ‘inside’ as a Being-in-the-world which knows. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein.
Desiring the Kingdom
I am reading this for an online book discussion group.
Ten Habits of Happy Mothers
I just started a reread of this for an unschooling mother's group.
Ongoing Devotional Reading
Magnificat daily mass readings
Vulgate/Douay-Rheims interlinear Bible (Gospel of Matthew)
Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons
I am on the fifth sermon in the first volume.
Providence thus acts daily. The early life of all men is private; it is as children, generally, that their characters are formed to good or evil; and those who form them to good, their truest and chief benefactors, are unknown to the world.
Catechism of the Catholic Church
I have resolved to read through this not in 1 year, but in however long it takes.
I Believe in Love: A Personal Retreat Based on the Teachings of St Therese of Lisieux
Another reread.
Library Books
Focus by Daniel Goleman.
The library took it back before I finished it. I was about 2/3 through. The last part I read was about emotional intelligence and how it relates to focus.
My Life in Middlemarch
The author revisits her adolescent first reading of Middlemarch through the filter of later life. (Personally I did not read Middlemarch till a few years ago). I am a couple of chapters in.
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it,” (George Eliot) writes. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
Howard's End is On the Landing
I borrowed this because it was mentioned somewhere online. I just started reading it. The author decided to spend a whole year reading only what was already in her house (academic reading excepted). I am just up to the Wodehouse chapter -- she says Wooster's silly-ass manner conceals a razor-sharp brain? !? I had to read that to my teenager.
Tempest: Trilogy
I like time travel books and I tend to read YA because I don't really want to hear about gruesome or explicit things when I am just trying to relax. I am not sure what reading level this would be because while the story was personable and involving, the protagonist was a college-age kid and had a modern college-age relationship with his girlfriend. I wouldn't give it to a younger teenager.
Frankenstein
I've never read this before, but decided to give it a try because I was considering having my high schooler read it. I am a couple of chapters in.
As a child I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
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