This was a better week!
Quick review on this week's readings:
29nd Voyage of The Beagle by Darwin: 4/5 Intense racism/Euro-supremacy aside, this was really interestingly written. Write about the real world like it's weird, a fantasy, culture, etc. is a common enough writing prompt, but Darwin does it better.
30th Antigone by Sophocles: 4/5 It's a play about stealing your brother's body, with strong writing and a genre savvy henchman. Written in 440 BC.
31st Don Quixote by Cervantes: 4/5 It's a novel about a crazy guy who thinks he's in a romance novel and his suffering sidekick that plays it completely straight.
Feb 1st Le Morte d'Arthur by Mallory: 2/5 This is like a series of blurbs to actual King Arthur stories.
2nd Hamlet by Shakespeare: 3/5 Hamlet is a good play. It (and most of Shakespeare) plays way better than it reads though. Unlike Sophocles, who works pretty well on paper.
3rd The Alchemist by Johnson: 3/5 Insult humor and a heist! Also kinda meh on paper, but I'd like to watch it. Maybe it's just an Elizabethan drama thing.
4th Characteristics by Carlyle: 3/5 We do best when everything works together and we don't have to think about it. Not wrong as a thesis, but reaching a little in some places and a bit rambly.
Weekly average 3.3 Again, this probably says more about how much I like prose fiction than anything else. Cervantes and Darwin (whose travelogue is almost enough to make me believe in Creative Non-Fiction) are carrying, with some help from Sophocles. I think that if I switch to watching plays instead/in addition to reading them that Shakespeare and Johnson would both move up some. I'm going to have to go back and read another section/translation of Mallory. I hear nothing but good things about it, but I feel like this chunk was a glorified Wikipedia summary. Carlyle fell for the classic trap of taking a short essay and stretching it out too long without enough material.
Overall Thoughts on The Project:
We're heavy on fiction this week (and got another one on the 5th, which I read before writing this) and I want to take a minute to appreciate that, since I don't think I did. Yes, it's cool to read founding documents. Yes, I appreciate that I now know that it's possible to read philosophy that isn't, "everything sucks." Yes, some of the essays have been thought provoking. But fiction is just fun, and I still think there's value in having a shared cultural story pool to draw from. I read an article once that said if you read a certain 50 or so stories that you'd have the source of 90% of plots, allusions, etc. That's really cool, and worthwhile to learn about. I think the pool is getting a little wider now as more works exist (and more cultures are represented) but I don't think it's impossible to do. We can probably prune some of the older stuff that's referenced less to help keep it from totally growing out of control. Really, that's true of the canon as a whole. The old stuff still needs to be tested from time to time, just as new stuff should be accepted if it's good enough.
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