BHAG COMPLETE: 287 Classics in 555 Weeks

BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOAL COMPLETE!!!!

Started: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 
Completed: Tuesday, June 4, 2013 
at 3:33 PM.

287 books in 3885 days or 

10 years, 7 months, 20 days or . . . 

• 555 weeks
• 93,240 hours
• 5,594,400 minutes
• 335,664,000 seconds

How appropriate to start and end this journey with the Invitation to the Classics List (85 books).

In between, I read The Well-Educated Mind (154 books) and The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics (104 books if you count sequels and trilogies). Minus the overlap on each list that is 287 
books! (press links to see the lists)

Here is the entire list compiled: https://carolhomeschool2.blogspot.com/2011/09/well-educated-mind-list.html

MY STORY

My love for classical literature came very late in life! It was 1996, and I happened by a PBS performance of a musical: Les Miserables. I was enthralled and told my mother-in-law how much it moved me. She went back to her bedroom and returned with the book, Les Miserables, in a thick paperback. I couldn't put it down. I wept through the last fifteen pages in June of 1996 and did not want it to end. On my birthday, the next month, I was at a live performance of the musical. From then on, I was hooked on the classics! 

When I came back from Malaysia in 1999, my friend, Teala, invited me over to  watch what everyone else watched while I was away: Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth! What a delight! But the book is always better than the movie so shortly after that, I visited my mom in California and she got the book for me from her library. OH MY! 

We traveled all over the West throughout the spring and summer, telling people about our time in Malaysia. During our nomadic wanderings, I gobbled up all five additional Austen novels. 

Prior to that, despite having a master's degree, the only classics I had ever read were The Great Gatsby and Siddhartha during my freshman year in high school (1974). I did NOT get those books, I was too young to understand them! 

When we settled back to the States, and I started home educating, I wanted a semi-classical education for my kids. I also wanted to do the four year cycle of history suggested by The Well-Trained Mind and to integrate the literature of the time period we were studying. Somehow, I ran across Invitation to the Classics and David Denby's Great Books in my library, and these books inspired me to read the classics in an orderly way in order to be a good example for my kids; picking and choosing which ones I would have them read.

I had already read a few books on the Invitation to the Classics (ITC) list before the "official" start of this journey on October 16, 2002 (Pride and Prejudice, Pilgrim's Progress, Beowulf, Inferno, and Letters and Papers from Prison). So when I ordered my own copy of ITC, I also ordered The Brothers Karamazov (Read Oct 2002), Purgatorio (October 2002), and The Bacchae (Nov 2002). 

A year later, The Well-Educated Mind came out, and I switched to that list. This one took me almost 8 years to complete. Then, I did the 100 World Classics and finished this journey back where I started with Invitation to the Classics! 

Words cannot describe how much I learned. Maybe I will write a book about my journey someday!

But for right now, I am going to rest and bask in the accomplishment!!!

Doing the happy dance!!!

June 24, 2009 When I Completed the Ancients List of The Well-Educated Mind
(See My Photo Set in My Last Post or HERE)

By the way, in the midst of all of this, I started a classics book club with four other women with the original intent of reading the books from the list. But some did not like the books from the list. So we read other classics. That combined with the classics I read "off list" on my own, I have read 320 classics since 1996.

Here is the "off list":

Les Miserables
Silas Marner
Catcher in the Rye
Little Women
Little Men
Jo's Boys
Wives and Daughters
The Picture of Dorian Grey
Tale of Two Cities
Captains Courageous
Man's Search for Meaning (Babes)
The Alchemist (Babes)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Much Ado About Nothing
Wuthering Heights
A Room with a View
Passage to India
Northanger Abbey
Sense and Sensibility
Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Emma
Three Musketeers
Hound of the Baskervilles
Atonement (considered a modern classic)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (modern classic)
Night
Cry, the Beloved Country
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Scapegoat
The Count of Monte Cristo
Gone with the Wind
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
To Kill a Mockingbird

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens on Audio Download - Free Audio

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens on Audio Download - Free Audio

Just finished it, and it is such a keeper!!!

Same Kind of Different as Me Book Review: Heartwarming and Lovely

What a lovely story! I have to admit that I did the 50 page test (from "The Art of Reading" lecture from The Teaching Company), and I wasn't really engrossed after 50 pages. I think it really grabbed me at 100, but that may have been because I was uber-busy and couldn't really stop long enough to really read. Getting a cold really helped me settle in and truly enjoy this wonderful gem of a book. 


This is the last quote of the book, but it is my favorite:


"The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or somethin in between, this earth ain't no final restin place. So, in a way, we is all homeless -- just workin our way toward home." Denver Moore 


AMEN!

Our Hope Alone

Discussions with Bible Book Club on Monday night about Ecclesiastes and a long talk with Kim about the possibilities of losing everything in this economy prompted me to read the interchange between Jemimah and Job in both settings.

From The Misery of Job and The Mercy of God by John Piper:

"So you think God was kind to make
You sick," Jemimah asked, "and take
Away your health and all your sons
And friends, and daughters--all the onesYou loved."

"Jemimah, what I think
is this: The Lord has made me drink
the cup of his severity
That he might kindly show to me
What I would be when only he
Remains in my calamity.
Unkindly he has kindly shown
That he was not my hope alone."

May He be our hope alone.

Quote from Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren F. Winner

Her thoughts on the Jewish marriage ceremony compared to Christian ones:

The vows in the Jewish wedding ceremony are simple. As the groom puts the ring on the bride's finger, he says, "Behold, you are consecrated to me according to the laws of Moses and Israel." Then comes the reading of the ketubah, a contract dating at least to the second century CE. The traditional version names the date and place of the wedding, and then details the monetary settlement the groom will owe the bride in case of divorce . . . I remember once upon a time thinking that this was a very grave but profound and insightful way to begin a marriage , this recognition of the possibility of failure. I now feel discomfited when sitting through this segment of Jewish weddings, when it is laid bare that I am indeed watching a contractual agreement, not a sacramental covenant; and I have to remind myself that Hebrew Scripture, Old Testament permits divorce under many circumstance. It is only with Jesus' stern words to the Pharisees that divorce became a very occasional exception to the ever more normative lifelong marriage.

"In this nuptial particular, I feel that Christianity tells the best story. But theology, I realize, is different from sociology, and the statistics --which show evangelical Christians divorcing at a rate just slightly higher than that of the rest of America -- suggest that however perfect in theory, that something about Christian marriage-making (Or, at least, Christian marriage-keeping) does not work. And here is where Jewish nuptials, depressing ketubah makes my shoulders tense up, everything that surround the ketubah makes good sense. I wish we could import some of it to the church."

". . . Under the chuppah (four cornered canopy that symbolizes among other things "the sure protection of God's love."), after the exchange of rings and the reading of the ketubah and the pronouncing of blessings, comes the famous breaking of glass--the groom crushes a goblet (wrapped in a packet or bag, of course) under his feet. The broken glass warns of the frailty of marriage. It also recalls the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, a somber comment of Jewish history that should be remembered at even the most joyous occasions. Another interpretation hold that the loud crunch of the glass scares off all demons who might have been hanging around, plotting to trip up the wedding party . . ."

The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God by John Piper

"He is not poor nor much enticed
Who loses everything for Christ.
It won't be long before the rod
Becomes the tender kiss of God."

Notes from the conclusion of Walden

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. "

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his compainions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults, even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may have perhaps some pleasant, thirlling glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's above; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. . . Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage . . . It is life near the bone where it is sweetest . . . Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”

"I delight to come to my bearings -- not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may --not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by."

"As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect."