Back to updating this on Monday, oh yeah.
Quick review on this week's readings:
July 1 The Origin of Species by Darwin: 2/5 For some reason, we're reading the prologue today.
July 2 Caesar from Plutarch's Lives: 1/5 I wonder if these are better when you read them "in parallel" between the Greek and Roman lives as he intended. As is, meh.
July 3 The Battle of Gettysburg by Haskell : 3/5 More contemporaneous primary sources!
July 4 "The Declaration of Independence" by AMERICA: 4/5 More like 1776/5.
July 5 "The Story Told by The Tailor" from 1001 Nights: 2/5 Finally, another decent 1001 Nights story.
July 6 Utopia by More: 2/5 After 6 months of random sections in the middle of things that were hard to understand, we're pivoting hard towards boring intros this week.
July 7 The School For Scandal by Sheridan: 3/5 A good opening!
Average: 2.43/5 All intros all the time!
Overall Thoughts on The Project:
I posted a more general thoughts about the whole project over the weekend to mark the mid year. Really, my main thought line for this week is about the selection and all the intros.
It felt like 15MAD spent the first five months or so of the year carefully avoiding intros, giving out passages from the same book out of order, jumping around, overlapping, etc.
Now, it's leaning hard into intros, often in places that make no sense or are uninteresting. A twelve page summary of a bunch of people who thought of evolution before Darwin didn't feel super relevant, and the opening of Utopia doesn't tell us much. Then cycle around to The School For Scandal, which had a fine opening, but reminded me of the "start in the middle" weirdness of earlier in the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment