Today I found an excellent article from George Wythe College’s website entitled “The Necessity of the Classics”, by Louise Cowan:

Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity — not from a desire to inculcate “cultural literacy,” or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range of human sensibility. What is needed is to recapture their spirit of high nobility and magnanimity, of order and excellence, but to recapture that spirit in a framework of democracy engendered by a Biblical culture of radical openness. The things worth preserving, the things we ought to be passing down, far transcend any single heritage: they partake of the fundamental structures of being itself. Melville called them the “heartless, joyous, ever-juvenile eternities.” And if our children do not encounter these realities in their studies, they are not likely to encounter them at all. As Kagemusha makes clear, greatness of soul is an aspect of human being as such, but it is not a quality that comes naturally. It must be taught. The classics have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul. Far from being a particular province of the specialist, they are the essential foundation of our educational process and the impulsion toward that forward movement of the human spirit for which schools exist. In an unpoetic age, we have to learn all over again what and how to teach our own children. We need to re-read the Greeks.

After hours of cataloging and typing, my book collection is now entered into LibraryThing. (Well, almost — there are eight books where the ISBN number didn’t work and I’ll have to go back home to get the data so I can enter them in manually.) 638 books (including those eight). Wow — I thought I only had 540 or so.

So, what have I gained from all this? I’ve realized that there are a lot of books I don’t have, and now it’s easy to see what books I want to collect next. I’ve also gotten a lot of dust in my nose.

Last night I spent a couple of hours cataloging my books for entry into LibraryThing. A lot of my books (perhaps even the majority) don’t have ISBNs, having been printed before ISBNs started, and so I get to enter a lot by hand. But it’s fun. And I’m discovering books I’d forgotten I owned, which is always a delightful adventure. I’ve still got a long way to go with cataloging the books, though — several hundred left. That’s what I’ll do tonight and tomorrow.

As far as reading goes, I’m still in Jane Eyre and War and Peace, both of which I’m enjoying heartily. I also finished reading Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book about graphs and information display. It’s a good read. And I just went to the library and checked out two books that look good: Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write and Mark Robert Waldman’s The Spirit of Writing. It’s been a while since I read any books on writing, but they’re some of my favorites. Books about books and writing and the word make me happy.

Now I just need more time for reading… Right now I’ve got a Music 201 midterm coming up, though, so I probably should be spending my time reading the textbook. ~sigh~

LibraryThing got a sweet deal with Abebooks.com:

LibraryThing is getting a partner. The partner is Abebooks.com, the Canadian company that matches booksellers with booklovers. Abe has taken a minority (40%) share of the company; I retain 60% and majority control. With the financial security and resources Abe brings to the table, LibraryThing’s future looks very bright—increased membership, decent servers and two-three employees working on exciting new features….

I also rejected every offer to swallow, popularize and commercialize LibraryThing—the idea being that if LibraryThing were less about book lovers and what they wanted, and more about video games and “special deals,” it would somehow be more appealing to “regular” people. R-r-right.

And I gave in and bought a lifetime membership (it’s only $25, after all). So now I have to catalog the other 400ish books I have… (Hmm, I don’t think I have any homework due tomorrow… ~devious grin~)

Check out Bookworm Droppings, a compilation of funny quotes from bookstores. Here are some of them:

“I had a book myself once. Never read it. It was blue. I don’t suppose you have a copy?”

When folks ask if I rent books, I tell them yes, certainly, for a non-refundable cash deposit…

I was once asked by a student for a copy of Tolstoy’s “Lord of the Rings.” I suggested the authoritative Tolkien translation.

Customer: Do you have a copy of the complete works of Edger Allen Poe?
Bookseller: We sure do! Have you tried in classics?
Customer: Yes but I am not sure who wrote it.

This morning as I made breakfast, I decided to try listening to the The Man Who Was Thursday instead of to music. And I did, for about 20 minutes, and it was better than I expected (the experience, that is — I’ve already read the book). Listening to audiobooks is like being a kid again and snuggling up with Mommy or Daddy while they read to you. Except without the snuggling.

Anyway, I haven’t really read any Chesterton in the last four years, so it was nice to remember how great he is. I really had to concentrate to keep up with the story, though, because it’s deep. Here’s one of my favorite quotes so far, pulling from the Bartleby edition:

Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.

“And even then,” he said, “we poets always ask the question, ‘And what is Victoria now that you have got there?’ You think Victoria is like the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.”

“There again,” said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It’s mere vomiting.”

The girl winced for a flash at the unpleasant word, but Syme was too hot to heed her.

“It is things going right,” he cried, “that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars — the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”

That’s Chesterton for you.

I’ve started reading St. Augustine’s Confessions in Latin. Now, it’s been almost four years since I studied Latin. Long time. And yet a lot of it’s stuck, miraculously. I remember a lot of the endings (they seem to have become a permanent part of me), and even some of the vocab. But it’s not enough, and so I’m going to be hitting the books again (Wheelock’s Latin and Moreland & Fleischer, along with Allen & Greenough’s Grammar). Studying just the grammar books probably wouldn’t be satisfying enough, however, so I’ll continue reading St. Augustine as I go. It’s been my experience that reading real texts helps immensely with getting the feel of a language. (Hmm, I guess I have a penchant for stating the obvious.) At any rate, I want to be reading fluently before long (long meaning any time between a year from now and 10 years from now ), and so the more I read, the better I’ll get.

From Library Garden, Rocking Out on Pandora:

What I like best about Pandora (besides the fact that it always seems to play music that I like based upon one suggestion) is their objective to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”. They really seem to be doing it. How? By assigning a variety of attributes to songs that get at the core of what the music is really about and what people might like about that particular song.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that was freely available on the web and simple to use that captured “the essence” of books?

FYI, Pandora lets you give it the name of a piece of music you like, and it’ll play other songs that you’ll probably like as well. I haven’t tried it out yet (the cable on my headphones is too short, and so I have to hunch over to listen to anything), but it sounds really cool. It’s based on the Music Genome Project.

So, I’m wondering how much LibraryThing is already doing this. The MGP apparently has over 400 attributes listed, and I doubt LibraryThing is that extensive (at least not yet). It’s a really interesting concept, though, and I think it’s something that ought to be done.

You may have noticed that I’ve added the LibraryThing random books blog widget to the sidebar. Mmm. And on Monday, Tim added language support, so you can say, “This book was originally in Latin, but my copy of it is an English translation.” Very, very cool. I joined the LibraryThing Google group a few days ago, too.

So, now that finals are over, I’ll hopefully have some time soon (like tonight) to finish entering in the rest of my books. Those that have ISBN #s are easy, but a lot of mine were published before ISBNs, and so I’ll have to write it all out by hand. (I don’t have a computer at my apartment now that my laptop’s dead.) But it’s a labor of love, and I don’t really mind.

Now what I need to do is figure out how to access LibraryThing from my cell phone so I don’t buy duplicates when I visit the used bookstores…

Came across this passage last night while reading Jane Eyre (p. 203, four or five pages from the end of chapter 20), and thought it quite beautiful:

He [Mr. Rochester] moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in the wall bordering the orchard. I, supposing he had done with me, prepared to return to the house; again, however, I heard him call “Jane!” He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me.

“Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,” he said; “that house is a mere dungeon; don’t you feel it so?”

“It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir.”

“The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” he answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium; you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now here” (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) “all is real, sweet, and pure.”

He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple-trees, pear-trees, and cherry-trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies, mingled with southernwood, sweet-briar, and various fragrant herbs. They were fresh now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a lovely spring morning, could make them: the sun was just entering the dappled east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard-trees and shone down the quiet walks under them.