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I forgot to do Lifetime Learning Project monthly wrap ups for July and August. Oops. I guess the summer flew by too fast. :-) It's the end of the quarter now, so let's take a look back at the goals I set in July and how close I came:
1) My main focus was the Reading Challenges I signed up for. Because the Countdown Challenge ended Sept. 9, I made that one my primary driver and aimed to finish it along with at least seven others. GOAL ACHIEVED! Yay for me!!
Decades Reading Challenge Completed: 9/9 **Finished July 2, 2009**
2nds Reading Challenge Completed: 12/12 **Finished July 12, 2009**
Pub Challenge Completed: 9/9 **Finished July 29, 2009**
Support Your Local Library Challenge Completed: 50/50 **Finished August 5, 2009**
1% Well Read Challenge Completed: 13/13 **Finished August 10, 2009**
The Countdown Challenge Completed: 45/45 **Finished September 6, 2009** (Yahoo! I did it!!)
100+ Reading Challenge Completed: 100/100 **Finished September 17, 2009** (The rest of the year is gravy!!)
New Author Challenge Completed: 50/50 **Finished September 26, 2009**
2) I wanted to finish up The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
. I never looked at it. Not even once.3) I have at least three Knowledge Blocks in progress, including the one I originally wrote about regarding Art Forgery. I wanted to try to rein in my literary ADD long enough to finish at least one of those blocks and write about it. Nope. Didn't do this. But I thought about it! :-)
4) Continue picking away at books and lectures from my Teaching Company Course "Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature". Nada on this one, too. I was very busy with those challenges!
I'll call eight finished challenges an enormous success! The rest was evidently too much to ask in concert with that. Live and learn. And that's what this is all about, right? :-) Tomorrow I'll post my Fourth Quarter Lifetime Learning Project goals, and I'm pretty sure I'm going easy on myself. After all, my Timberwolves are about to start playing some basketball, and they need me. GO WOLVES!!
here to review, which I am even more excited about. :-) Ah, the silliness of it all!
, I decided it was my responsibility to read the original first. While I've shied from Jane Austen because, well, for the most part I'm not a "
much more than I expected I would. It's not that the story is particularly engrossing, but the characters are so well developed that I couldn't avoid an affection for many of them (and an irritation with some them) that made me want to know about their lives, however unexciting they may be in comparison to other things I could have been reading. I love Georgette Heyer's books, and I would absolutely have drawn a mental comparison between the two had I read Austen first. They both have an uncanny ability with dialog and creating distinct, identifiable personalities with that alone.
has been praised all over blogdom and with good reason. It is just plain good entertainment. It is chick-lit from a guy's perspective. It's funny and emotional and gives us women some insight into just how a guy's mind works. Or might work, anyway. And, yes, they think about sex all the time. Mystery solved! :-) As I began reading, I was a little concerned that it would be the central theme of the story, but while it is nearly always present on the surface, Hornby handles it in a manner that is not at all off-putting.
. Most people have probably never heard of him. He's the guy generally playing overseas or spending most of his NBA minutes on the bench cheering on his famous team mates. I heard of him when he was a member of the Timberwolves training camp a couple seasons ago. He was released before the season started. Apparently things haven't changed much for him since he wrote this book.
first. I know that seems backwards. They're not the same story, but the thematic resemblances are such that I think I would have been able to follow Mrs. Dalloway more effectively. Cunningham captures the stream-of-consciousness feel without the leaving you wondering what on earth you just read, making those very themes a little easier to tease out.
is more about psychology than it is about Nazi concentration camps, but that does not make Viktor Frankl's book any less inspiring. 
is one of those simple pleasures. This collection of essays makes all of us book junkies feel completely at home. We get it, no matter how crazy. My favorite essay was how she finally really felt married once she and her husband combined their book collections after five years of marriage. See? We get that! And compulsive proofreading of dinner menus? We get that!
is Michelle Moran's best work to date. While both Selene and Alexander do seem rather mature for their age in the book, Michelle explains in the author's note with the observation that they are the offspring of one of the most educated rulers in the history of Egypt. In addition, during a time when life expectancy was significantly less than it is now, for both natural and unnatural reasons in the case of royalty, one had little choice other than to mature quickly if one was to survive.
, a volume in 
is not my favorite of Sedaris' works that I have read so far (
was that it didn't just talk about the meth problem as a single issue. The stories of the addicts were heartbreaking, no doubt. But the book is equally if not more about the economic and legal environments that lie beneath. The story is meth addiction as the symptom, not the problem. The author goes into detail regarding the consolidation of the food industry and how it affected so many small towns. He talks about how Big Pharma lobbyists help pass laws in Washington, D.C., that ultimately help drug traffikers. He talks about national and local politics, both the official and unofficial kind, that exacerbate the problems while claiming to be solving them. And he explains it all in manner that I can actually follow and understand.
edited by Toni Morrison. I chose this one because I want to read more essays about literature. OK, and it was 60% off. :-)
by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer was one of the author interviews included in Volume II. I was particularly intrigued by a short discussion of "Gimpel the Fool", so I thought I'd start here with his work.
by John Gardner, another author interviewed in Volume II. This is part of the description from the jacket flap: "With a daring not obscured by the author’s extraordinary humaneness of spirit, the book argued that contemporary literature suffers first and foremost from a basic failure of the test of 'morality.' By 'moral fiction' the author meant fiction that attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology or mode of conduct, but in a honest and open-minded effort to find out what best promotes human fulfillment." Gardner discussed some of his ideas from this book in his interview, and it sounded like something I would enjoy reading. Barnes & Noble has a new line of books called "Barnes & Noble Rediscovers Series" and this one just happened to be sitting front and center for a mere $9.95 in hardcover. Serendipity!
are:
is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach churning stories. They're told by people who have answered an ad for a writers' retreat and unwittingly joined a 'Survivor'-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you'll ever read, one that could come only from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk." (From the back of the Anchor Books edition.)