15MinuteClassics: A to Z Theme Reveal

Since I'm already blogging every day, I decided to hop onto the A to Z Challenge that a few of my friends are doing. Short version: Every day (except Sundays) in April I have to post an entry that somehow relates to a letter of the alphabet, starting with A on the first. I looked, and about half the days line up fairly easily. For example April 1st will be "A is for April" with a Browning poem with the line ""Oh! to Be in England Now That April's There."

For the handful of you already following the blog, there will be very few changes, but this will hopefully get some more eyes on the blog before the handful of friends I've personally invited. I've been wanting to post it around a little for a while, so this is a great way to do it.

For those of you who are new, a quick intro to the blog, and links to a few posts:

15 Minute Classics is based on The Harvard Classics (usually referred to here as T5FSOB for The Five Foot Shelf of Books) reading guide. Charles Eliot, longtime president of Harvard University, claimed that he could put together a collection of books that would fit on a three foot long shelf and give a person a liberal education if they studied them closely enough. He later bumped it up to five feet, and Collier Publishing took him up on it. If nothing else, it was a solid marketing gimmick, and the collection sold thousands of copies (most frequently in the form of 50 hardcover volumes) between its initial publication in 1909 and the 1970s. It's a fairly wide selection: poetry, drama, history, science, travel... It's got the expected "dead white guy" biases, but that's not surprising, and it doesn't detract from the quality of the texts, many of which are still foundational in their respective areas. In the 1910s, a reading guide (volume 51) and a 20 volume fiction collection were added.

The reading guide contained a list of readings (generally 10-20 pages in the original collection), one for every day of the year, that would take about 15 minutes to read, answer the timeless question "what shall I read?", and give you a starting point for your hypothetical liberal education.

Every day, I take the selection (they're all public domain, and generally pretty easy to find, except a few that use a weird translation/edition), paste it into a Google doc, annotate it, and then post a brief summary and commentary here on the blog. Some days are better than others, both in the quality of the reading, and the energy I put into it. On a good day, you get some pictures, videos, or music to go with it. On a bad day, you get Robert Burns, whose poetry I would erase from reality if I could, but who Eliot loves. If a selection is good enough, it goes on a reading list that I'll circle back to someday to read read the whole piece. I do a weekly review posts where I sum up my feelings for the pieces, what I've learned from the project, etc. I generally lean more fun than scholarly, but hopefully you'll learn a little something. Occasionally, I do a bonus post on a more recent piece I think fits with the rest, or digging in on a subject I learned about from one of the readings.

If you want a quick taste of the blog, here are a few entries I'm fond of:

January 1st: Ben Franklin's Autobiography- A good way to start off the year. I don't know how many times I've had to read and reread this in HS, college, etc., but it's great every time.

January 11th: Federalist 1 by Alexander Hamilton (and 2 by Jay, which is less good)- I was not expecting to enjoy an article some guy wrote to convince people to support forming the US. I was wrong. Very insightful, with advice still worth following today. "serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions [...]we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists."

February 27th: Longfellow's Poems- I don't like poetry. I love Longfellow. "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul."

Today!: Crabs, Coconuts, and Coral from The Journey of The Beagle by Charles Darwin- Darwin is part travel writer, part horror, part RPG sourcebook, and all well written. I wasn't super excited when the first excerpt popped up, but he's one I always look forward to now.

Reflection 9- Some kind of an attempt to explain my rating system.

I'm supposed to put this badge in, apparently: