Lifelong Learning Project: My Personal Mission Statement

Questions from my readers and some other friends had me sitting at the dining room table this evening, pen in hand, asking myself, "What is my real goal with this 'self-education' thing?" "I want to learn" is great, but I knew I needed a better answer even just for myself. This education means more to me than that. I needed something I could look at and live by, something that would begin a path I could follow from now until my time runs out. And here it is:



LIFELONG LEARNING PROJECT PERSONAL MISSION STATEMENT

To provide myself a broad, liberal, literature-focused education using books, both fiction and nonfiction, online and audio educational tools, and utilizing my blog as a virtual classroom to encourage interaction with other readers.

Because this is a Lifelong Learning Project, there is no final Ultimate Goal, but I will create a set of general, fluid goals each year and support them with alterable quarterly plans and more concrete monthly plans as I identify individual educational themes I would like to actively pursue.

I will read literature and texts pertaining to the chosen themes and seek out additional tools to expand and build upon my reading.

I will regularly post my discoveries, thoughts and conclusions on Books 'N Border Collies, encourage interaction with my readers and respond to all comments left by you, my virtual classmates.



Welcome to my Lifelong Learning Project! My next immediate goal will be to post those "general, fluid goals" for 2009, my second quarter "alterable" plan and my "more concrete" plan for the rest of March and April. I'll have that up by the end of the week. I have to think about that for a bit! :-)

Happy learning, everyone!

Awesome Vegetarian Recipe

A little off topic, but I know there are lots of us out there who look for really great vegetarian recipes. This is one of them!


Peter's mom loves for us to sit and watch cooking shows with her when we visit. Last weekend we watched "Ask Aida", and she made this amazing looking vegetarian pot pie. For the first time in my life, I went to the Food Network website, downloaded a recipe and actually used it. :-) I cooked this pot pie this afternoon, and I could not have been happier with the results. Peter and I ate almost the entire 8x8 pan full! (Yeah. I'm sure that was a healthy choice. LOL!) Here is the link to the recipe:

Aida's Vegetarian Pot Pie

Now, where is that Culver's Butter Brickle Ice Cream I brought home yesterday. . . :-)

Have a great day, everyone! Book talk coming tomorrow, I promise!

A Failure To Plan. . .

. . . is a plan to fail. Annoying, but true. I've been distracted, and I need to utilize this blog to keep me at least halfway focused. Therefore, here is my plan for the rest of March:

Read: Book III of The Faerie Queene
Read: Catherine Carmier by Ernest J. Gaines
Read: Day by Elie Wiesel
Read: Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levy
Read: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stone
Listen To: Teaching Company lecture on Tristam Shandy
Read: Chapters 3 & 4 from The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
Read: Chapter 2 from Writing About Literature

There. Now I have all of you to demand an explanation if I slack off. :-) It's not too demanding being as there are only about two weeks left of the month, and my T-Wolves will be demanding a chunk of my attention with the NBA season winding down. Once that is over (April 15 for us), it's gloves-off for my learning plan!

Feel free to comment or ask questions about anything I'm doing or reading for my Lifelong Learning Project (temporary name until I come up with something clever). Interaction with classmates is an important component of the educational experience! :-)

Happy Friday, All!

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

by Emily Brontë



"In this classic romance, Heathcliff, a young destitute boy, is brought to the home of Mr. Earnshaw, on the Yorkshire moors. As Heathcliff grows, and slowly falls in love with Mr. Earnshaw's daughter, Catherine, he begins a series of events that will have implications for generations to come." (From the CD container)

Here are my honest initial reactions: The writing is absolutely gorgeous and kept me going long after I decided I despised every person in this book. The whole lot of them are a study in the worst kind of dysfunction. Heathcliff is an unhinged ass, and why this character is ever loved and described as a hero is beyond my comprehension, Catherine embodies everything I abhor in spoiled, self-centered women, and their children elicited no more sympathy in me than did their parents. As a good friend said the other day, I need at least one character I can cheer for in order for me to really like a book. There were none here.

Now that I got that out of my system . . . :-) I listened to Wuthering Heights at this time because it was available at the library, and I thought to get a jump on some of the reading for my Teaching Company course. It is probably at least a month or two in the future, but I can't wait to get to the section on this book! I'm curious to see how my opinion is molded by a good lecture on its merits. I can feel in my bones that it will be, because while I couldn't stand any of the characters, I was still enthralled with the story. Why is that? I wonder if I should listen to the lectures out of order. . . . No. I'll mull it over on my own for a while.

In the meantime, have you read Wuthering Heights? What was your gut reaction to it?

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER

by William Styron



"[T]here was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me." (The Confessions of Nat Turner, p. 48)

In August of 1831, Nat Turner, believing himself to be carrying out God's instructions, led a slave revolt intended to wipe out the white population of Southampton County, Virginia. Before he and his followers were defeated, they left approximately 60 while people dead, including many women and children, and wide-spread fear in the South of similar incidents recurring. This is his story.

The writing style in The Confessions of Nat Turner is very dense -- dense to the point of seeming tedious unless I consciously put aside my impatience for a faster-paced story line and let the narrative guide me through the complexity of Nat Turner's mind. It's not easy to get a handle on why a slave who had a comparatively easy existence would be the one to mastermind a bloody revolt in an effort to eradicate white people, rather than one who had suffered under the whip of a brutal master. The extended detail helps the reader to feel the simmering of years of confusion and hatred as opposed to focusing on the sensationalism of the outcome.

It also helps the reader to absorb the abundant ironies in the story. Nat receives preferential treatment from most of his masters his whole life, some can almost be described as kind, but he longs to see them dead. He becomes fanatically religious, committing much of the Bible to memory and preaching to other slaves in the community to help them find salvation. Then, just as slaveholders use the Bible to condone the institution, Nat uses Biblical quotes to drive his listeners to a murderous frenzy and justify the massacre to them and himself. He dreams of wiping out the white race, then when the time for his rebellion comes, he himself kills only one person -- a young woman who had always been kind to him. And in the end, the judge who sentences Nat to hang is the one person Nat had identified early in his plans as one who should be spared death from the hands of his followers.

I was not emotionally captivated by The Confessions of Nat Turner in the way that I have been by some other novels of slavery, but there was something about it that held my imagination, if not my undivided attention. The Vintage International edition that I read also included an afterword by the author in which he discussed the reaction of the black community to his book at the time of publication and opposition he faced as a white man writing a legendary black man's story. It put some of the questions I had into perspective and gave me an even higher appreciation for the book.

For the curious, you can read the real-life confession of Nat Turner here.

THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING

by Simon Winchester



The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, the title pretty much says it all. And who would have thought there would be so much drama in the creation of a dictionary! Come to think of it, who thinks about the creation of a dictionary in general? :-) Apparently Simon Winchester spends a lot of time thinking about it, because he's written two books on the subject. The other is The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, which has moved up a couple of notches on my TBR list now that I've heard a little bit about the man he discusses in it. He was an inmate at a sanitarium while he was working on the OED, and the editor had no idea!

Other interesting factoids:

- The Oxford English Dictionary took 71 years to produce
- Hundreds of volunteer readers scoured thousands of books to amass well over a million illustrative quotations of the words included in the dictionary
- J.R.R. Tolkien was an assistant editor for the OED
- Novelist Julian Barnes worked on the supplement for the OED after its initial publication
- Alexander Graham Bell gave one of his first versions of the telephone to one of the original OED editors, who then abandoned it as useless junk in his attic

There is more! This book was a lot of fun to listen to, especially for a trivia junky. It was fascinating to hear and think about all the living, breathing people who worked so devotedly on one of our favorite reference books long, long before there were any such things as computers. Yeah. It was all done manually. "Manual • adjective 1 made or worked with the hands. 2 using or working with the hands: a manual worker." (Compact Oxford English Dictionary)

Thanks, Serena!

The fabulously fabulous Serena from Savvy Verse & Wit bestowed upon me this cool blog award. Thanks, Serena! With this gift, I am required to come up with five things I am obsessed with. I think I can do that. Let me see. . .

1) We'll start with the obvious: Books. Enough said. :-)

2) My boys. That includes hubby Peter, our kitty Jack, and the Border Boys, Skye and Max. As long as I have my boys and my books around, may the rest of the world do what it will. I'll manage just fine!

2) The Timberwolves. I love my Minnesota Timberwolves!

4) Learning. You can include The Teaching Company and the idea of achieving an astonishing autodidactic education here.

5) I am obsessed with the idea of writing a book about books someday. I'm in the process of trying to come up with a cool angle that isn't already done to death. Any suggestions from all of you?? I'd love to hear what would interest other book junkies.

This award has been around for awhile, so I'm throwing it out there for all of you so I can get to know everyone! Take that Fabulous button, list five things you're obsessed with on your blog, and leave me a link here in the comments so I can learn about you, too!

What I Bought Today

Peter took me to my favorite Barnes & Noble so I could spend a couple of hours browsing aimlessly. I always find things at this particular store that I never see anywhere else. To make up for my cranky mood due to our return to below freezing temps (Spring, where are you??), here is what I picked up today:



From the back cover: "Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say 'I want to believe.' " I've seen this one previously and couldn't pass it up this time for fear I would forget about it. Again.



"Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which 'spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time--the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.' " (From the back cover) This novel keeps getting mentioned in some of my other reading. I had to bring it home when I finally ran across a copy.



I finally caved. What can I say? Call me a lemming. :-)

I have no idea when I will get to any of these, but I feel much better just having them in my possession where I can horde them with the rest of my literary treasures.

Happy Reading, Everyone!