My wife and I were talking about blogging at dinner tonight, and she asked me about my plans for A to Z. That reminded me that I hadn't whined to her yet about a set back I had earlier this week. As I talked about the other day, the trademark of Great Books of the Western World is the Synopticon, which is an index of the appearances of 100-odd themes in the collection. Not wanted to spend another month trying to find random excerpts scattered across 50 books (and then trying to find copies online), I decided to limit myself to the more manageable Gateway to the Great Books this year, which is only 10 volumes, and mostly consists of shorter complete pieces (no excerpts, yay!) The first volume has a section called a Synoptical Guide, which I assumed would be like the Synopticon, but for the more limited contents of Gateway...
Nope. Instead, it's an alphabetical list of authors, then lists the great ideas they're linked with, and where to find more about them in the full Great Books. Clearly more of an attempt at advertising than a serious index. I can ctrl+f my way through it to find the stuff I need, but frustrated and annoyed with the whole thing. I might make a tweak to my A to Z theme. Still classics, but maybe a slightly different set or means of selecting them.
I do think I finally got the Alpine Butterfly down at least.
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