Classics Considered

This month, Cleo is hosting a readalong of The Art of Loving (1956) by Erich Fromm and On Friendship by Cicero. It's a sequel to the Four Loves Readalong - which feels recent but was actually back in June(!!).  Fromm and C. S. Lewis were contemporaries (and Lewis's book was published just four years later), so it adds interest to see how their perspectives correspond or differ.  I'm also looking forward to Cicero, as I haven't read many ancient classics. You can find the full schedule on Cleo's post.  I felt the need to break down my check-ins a little more, so this one will cover the first 1 1/3 chapters. Chapter 1, "Is Love an Art?" Fromm opens with his short but pithy thesis - that love is not just a flurry of feelings, but an actual scientific art, like music or medicine, which must be learned and practiced. He posits three interrelated societal problems.  First, culture is overly focused on the state of "being loved," particul...

Well, I missed last week, so once again playing catch up with the readalong.  :)  Here are the last two parts - and thanks again to Cleo for hosting this! Week 3: Friendship In this chapter, Lewis talks about what he considers to be the "least natural" of the loves: Friendship.  It is less "organic" than the other loves, because, unlike Affection which nurtures or Eros which propagates, Friendship is, in a sense, superfluous in that it is not necessary to our survival. In fact, it can be viewed with distrust by authorities or groups of humans, because it means at least two people have withdrawn from the group and are connected by something which distinguishes them from the rest. This was the most interesting chapter of the book.  I don't have a wide circle of friends, but I appreciate each one I have (online and offline), and I think Lewis pinpoints why it is so hard to find good friends.  The problem frequently lies with us.  So often we are looki...

Cleo has been hosting a read-along of The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis, and happily I've been keeping up with it well, in spite of some reader's block.  These are the parts I've read so far: Week 1: "Introduction" and "Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human" Week 2: "Affection" First off, this book is not quite what I was expecting, and I say that not as a criticism but as an observation.  Lewis's style is a little rambling, in some places like a sermon that switches from topic to topic fluidly but lacks the structure you'd expect from a book with such a structural title.  He focuses on certain aspects of each topic, rather than giving a detailed overview of the whole.  For example, my biggest takeaway from "Likings and Loves..." was his view on healthy vs. unhealthy patriotism; in "Affection," it was more on "what to avoid" rather than "what to do."  It doesn't make the book any less reada...

Well...I promise I'm not trying to milk this for all it's worth.  But I realized that after "finishing" the review of 12 Rules for Life , I'd failed to answer my starting questions from Part 1 : What is about [Jordan Peterson] or his message that generates commonality between such disparate groups? What kind of person, with such a prestigious CV, is so willing to go out on a limb [against political correctness]? Is he really courageous, or is there some other reason? I think the answer to #1 is pretty simple.  Peterson's appeal lies in his embrace of core values, like honesty, hard work, integrity, and self-respect.  Any belief systems that value the individual and accountability are going to gravitate towards his message, which puts a big emphasis on you, the individual, taking action - making your life better and making the world better.  So that is what seems to make his following so diverse. To the second question - my takeaway from reading 12 Rul...

I've decided to share these quotes in the order they appear in the book, plus occasional commentary. All quotes are from the 2018 hardcover edition. Key: plaintext - Worthy quotes bold - Favorite quotes italics - Quotes I disliked 12 Rules for Life: Best and Worst Quotes The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism.  It's not communism, either, for that matter . . . We (the sovereign we , the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. (p. 14) - Agreed, seems pretty self-evident. . . . the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and the Pietà both express the female/male dual unity, as does the traditional insistence on the androgyny of Christ.   (p. 42) - "traditional insistence on the androgyny," what is he talking about? You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. ...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by Evstafiev [ CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons "No one could stand up for communism after The Gulag Archipelago - not even the communists themselves." ( 12 Rules for Life , p. 310) I would like to think that's true.  Unfortunately, admiration for Joseph Stalin is, by all appearances, far from dead .  The mass murderer has been rebranded as a WWII hero first and dictator second. While not all Russians subscribe to that narrative , there are some who are nostalgic for the USSR. I once briefly dated someone who felt that way.  It wasn't apparent on first impressions, but, as we got to know each other better, I learned he was an ardent Stalinist, fully heroizing Stalin and believing all the bad to be exaggerations, lies, or American propaganda, or (barring all that) nothing any worse than what U.S. presidents had done.  Though born in a former Soviet republic, he was not really old enough to remember life in the Soviet Union, yet ...

So... I have this get it back to the library ASAP (fines are accruing), but I can't seem to write a short review.  I tried, I really did, but it's hopeless.  Here is Part 1, and I hope to have Part 2 up tomorrow. First, some background... Jordan Peterson Gage Skidmore [ CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons As I mentioned in a previous post, my purpose in reading this book was to see what the fuss was about.  Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto (and formerly at Harvard and McGill), has become a controversial figure in recent years, for voicing his views on forms of political correctness which he sees as threatening to freedom of speech.  It's a long story which you can read about on Wikipedia , and I only mention it to give some context.  Peterson, whose YouTube lectures attract millions of followers, went on two years after the publicity to publish his 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos .  This book became a huge...

This year's reading is off to a good start, not so much in terms of speed (work and other activities have put the brakes on that) but in terms of content.  I've just finished G. K. Chesterton's Heretics , a light book for heavy hearts of little-'o' orthodox Christians who happen to be classic literature nerds.  Since I fall under that category, I found Heretics to be a bracing read and surprisingly relevant for the current times.  Chesterton is a hit-and-miss author for me; this book was definitely a "hit." George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, and G. K. Chesterton. Heretics (1905) comes under one of my favorite niche genres - authors writing about other authors.  In this series of essays, Chesterton critiques such literary luminaries as Rudyard Kipling , H. G. Wells , and George Bernard Shaw, as well as others who have since fallen out of readership.  Imperialism, Nietzsche's Superman, human progress, and other topics of the day are covered he...

In his memoir Open Heart , Elie Wiesel takes us through his experiences surrounding his 2011 open heart surgery.  Wiesel is famous for his Night trilogy, and here some of the same themes come back in short, fleeting chapters - the dark memories of life in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as the perennial question: why does God allow His children to suffer evil?  What should a Jewish person's response be in times of persecution or pain?  Question marks abound in this short work, underlining the great despair we may sometimes feel when evil touches our lives. One reason I picked up this book was to understand something of what a patient experiences during this medical procedure.  My grandma has faced a myriad of health issues, including two heart surgeries; she endured them with grace even while she was in terrible pain.  What could she have been feeling?  I have never asked her, choosing instead (as with other personal questions) to seek another avenue of ...

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.  Through much of the first half of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince , I did not understand the reason so much malevolence is associated with the author's name.  The first seventeen chapters come across as a detailed guide or manual to being a successful ruler.  Machiavelli initially comes across as pretty fair-minded for his time; he gives examples of successful princes, discusses soldiering much in the vein of Sun Tzu (he would later write his own The Art of War ), and even...

  For he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.   I gave this books 5 stars on Goodreads, but I almost gave it none.  By that, I mean it is an almost impossible book to rate in a generic sense.  I don't know where you are in your spiritual beliefs and growth, and so as a reviewer I can't possibly say what this book will be to you.  On the other hand, to me it was a five-star book - the caveat is that my rating is inherently personal.  Because of that, it may not be of much use here whether it has five stars or no rating. To quote the first sentences of his biography, in this Penguin edition: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen in 1813, the youngest of seven children.  His mother, his sisters and two of his brothers all died before he reached his twenty-first birthday. For context, Fear and Trembling was published in 1843 - he was o...

Previously: Book I , Book II , Book III The carriage started and raced off.  All was vague in the traveler's soul, but he greedily looked around him at the fields, the hills, the trees, a flock of geese flying high above him in the clear sky.  Suddenly he felt so well. What I got out of these two parts was not so much plot development but character development.  Through the eyes of Alyosha, we finally get to meet the enigmatic Karamazov brother, Ivan.  This in turn shows us their family's dysfunctional situation through his perspective, which by instinct is less disinterested than he might wish it to be. It's odd, but by far Ivan is my favorite character.  He is somewhat coldhearted, frequently profane, and not without some of the violent emotional tendencies of the oldest brother, Dmitri.  Still it is his anti-heroic traits and heroic potential that make him the most interesting character.  His bitterness is paradoxically deep-rooted and superficial....

On the bus this afternoon, I finished reading Viktor Frankl 's nonfiction classic, Man's Search for Meaning .  It is a short, two-part memoir, detailing first his experiences as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, and second, his own system of psychotherapy, logotherapy .  This latter is based on his belief that the driving force in human life is the search for life's meaning, as opposed to more materialistic or Freudian motives.  Frankl stresses the relationship between meaning and survival, as well as his assertion that a human being is not solely shaped by his or her surroundings.  On the contrary, a person in the worst of conditions is still left one liberty, and that is to choose the way they react to what is happening to them. For such a short work, this was a fascinating read.  I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars and would actually recommend it to anyone, whether you are into psychology or not.  There were several points that particularly stood out to me: ...

I hit the ground running when I started George Pólya 's How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method .  Somewhere in the middle, the momentum disappeared, and months later, I feel so relieved to have finished it.  For all that, I give it 5 out of 5 stars...yes, indeed, why?? This is a math/logic/philosophy classic from 1945, dealing with heuristic, "the study of the methods and rules of discovery and invention."  More particularly, it is a comprehensive guide to problem-solving.   The first 40 pages or so are strictly about "How to Solve It" and classroom strategies, while the rest of the book elaborates on these themes in the "Short Dictionary of Heurstic."  The back of the book has some sample problems/solutions, which, if I had more time and energy, I wouldn't mind trying. Hopefully the word "math" does not turn you away!  That is the one weakness of the book - most of the examples are in algebra and geometry, which, even for ...

Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. One of my methods of minimizing bias in my readings and reviews is to avoid introductions.  For Meditations (tr. by George Long), I made an exception since the biographical note was at the beginning and only a page long.  Naturally, learning that Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) persecuted Christians during his reign over Rome was something that inevitably altered my perspective.  (If anything, it turned out for the best, giving me a better understanding of and context for the book.) Stoic philosophy has long interested me with its emphasis on mind and attitude vs. emotions and circumstances.  As I understand it, the overwhelming intent of Stoicism is the achievement of spiritual peace in the midst of physical/external turmoil, becoming mentally "uncontaminated by pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by any insult, feeling no wrong . . . accepting ...

© Yanis Chilov [ CC-BY-SA-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons My introduction to Fyodor Dostoyevsky was through (surprise!) Crime and Punishment .  Unable to swallow its psychopathic elements, I gave up just when the story was picking up and could not, in fact, bring myself to finish it.  Fast-forward to summer/fall 2011 - I was taking History of Russia and the USSR, picked up The Idiot because it seemed timely, and found it almost as equally disturbing but vastly more fascinating than C&P.  Now, after several people have (independently of each other) inadvertently recommended him to me this year, I've returned to Dostoyevsky via Notes from Underground .   "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."  The anonymous narrator's self-deprecatory sense of humor is strangely charming, at least initially.  A retired government official, he lives now in seclusion in the "Underground" (or underworld) of St...

If it is difficult to review a book that is nonfiction and follows a less-than-linear outline, then it is doubly difficult to review such a book from the Christian apologetics genre.  And, naturally, one must explain a rating of 5 out of 5 stars . G. K. Chesterton 's Orthodoxy is an account of how he came to hold Christian orthodox beliefs.  By the term "orthodoxy" (the lowercase 'o'), he is not referring to a branch or denomination of the Church, but rather ". . . the Apostles' Creed , as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed." I happened to read Orthodoxy during or just after my 20th cent. Brit. History course, which included references to H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and other people of letters.  There was not one mention of Chesterton, despite his friendship with both Wells and Shaw; he does not fit neatly into the agenda presented in su...