I feel like this was not a strong week. Let's see how the review looks.
Quick review on this week's readings:
22nd Polyeucte by Cornielle: 3/5 There wasn't a lot here to judge. It seemed decent, but it's not really enough to give full thoughts on. Will read more later.
23rd "The Art of Persuasion" by Pascal: 2/5 A passable guide on how to persuade/instruct someone, but it's a two or three page article stretched to around double that.
24th The Odyssey by Homer: 4/5 I quibbled a bit about the particular section selected here, but The Odyssey is both well written and significant. I look forward to reading the other excerpts later.
25th "An Account of Egypt" by Herodotus: 3/5 Again, there's nothing actually wrong here. It's just a passable little travelogue with some anecdotes Herodotus picked up along the way. The "other's view of others" effect was a little interesting to thing about.
26th Assorted Robert Burns Poems: 1/5 Mediocre poems written in an awkward dialect.
27th Purgatorio by Dante: 4/5 I feel similarly here to how I did about The Odyssey. Not the excerpt I would've picked, but a little more thought provoking. We'll see it back again later.
28th The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis: 2/5 God says, "you suck!" repeat for five pages. I'm giving this two points for showing that Christian advice hasn't advanced at all in half a millennium, and that feels generous.
Weekly Average: 2.7/5 My leanings towards fiction are on full display with both The Odyssey and Purgatorio outscoring the rest of the week. This is a week that definitely benefited from my being willing to give a selection a point or two for making me think, even if I didn't actually like it.
Overall Thoughts on The Project:
This week was light on theme, and that made me think a little about the overall process of assembling the entries, reading guide, etc. I wrote a little about how I question including Burns at all. Given his stature in the poetry world (semi-official national poet of Scotland, has a pseudo holiday) I think it's fair to put him in the collection. I do, however, disagree with giving him an entire volume. From a skim of the list, I'm not seeing a ton of Celtic material in general. I'd have gladly taken a volume of Celtic folklore, poems, short stories, essays, etc. Throw "Address to Haggis" in there, that one's suitably goofy, and one of his most read. Likewise, I don't know that we needed an entire day of him. I'm very much trying not to shut out anything that isn't "standard English" or whatever out. Obviously, a ton of the works are translations, and the scope in time and style is part of what makes reading these interersting and worthwhile. I guess awkward written dialects is just where I draw the line.
I do wonder if a less scattershot approach might be more useful in general. There are some other reading guides in one of the later volumes that're more course-like. But these are more, "if you want to learn about philosophy, read all of these," than the bite sized, curated nightly list. I wonder if the nightly list could've been themed week to week, month to month, etc. In a few weeks, it has seemed like that, but this week was pretty meandering.
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