A Thousand and One Bradburian Nights, and other reading goals for 2005 (and beyond)
The reading life of any person is going to be a challenge, and that of the homeschooling stay-at-home mother is no exception. One could argue that we might have it slightly easier - or if not easier than more convenient - than most, if the conditions are right - and depending on the age and stage and number of your kids, that's a big if. But I agree with Cindy Rollins that the homeschooling mother is the new (and possibly only) leisure class left. Leisure as in time to learn, not as in "pass me the bon-bons and turn on All My Children." As Northrop Frye says in his essay, "The Instruments of Mental Production",
"In a society devoted wholly to labour, leisure would be thought of as merely rest or spare time: if there is continuous leisure, it becomes idleness or distraction. Idleness and distraction are reactions against the unpleasantness or dullness of labour: they make up for the time wasted on work by wasting time in other ways. A life divided only between dull work and distracted play is not life but essentially a mere waiting for death... Education has nothing to do with this vicious circle of labour and idleness: it begins in that moment of genuine leisure in which Adam is neither tilling the ground nor going fishing and leaving the real work to Eave, but remembering his lost Paradise."
And:
"We are accustomed to thinking that everyone needs to be functionally related to this society through the work he does. But if leisure comes to occupy so much of so many people's lives, the question of finding a social function in leisure becomes increasingly important. This is already a problem of some urgency with women, as middle-class housewives are the obvious victims of a machinery of production so over efficient that it can only continue to operate by turning as many people as possible into full time consumers. We appear, then, to be entering a period in which work and leisure are not embodied in different classes, but should be thought of as two aspects nearly equal in importance, of the same life. Every citizen maybe not only a Martha, troubled about many things, but a Mary who has chose the better part, and the question, 'What does he know?" becomes as relevant to defining one's social function as the question 'What does he do?"
Well, I feel seen, as the kids say.
Now that my kids are older (two are Actual Adults according to the law, which is both wonderful and incredible - in the more archaic sense of both those words) and they need me less as a constant motivator during our school days and more as a facilitator, listener, sounding board, proofreader - you get the idea, I feel like a door has opened and I'm taking a tentative step into a large room that because of homeschooling is larger than it would have been without and which I am better equipped to explore. (I'm thinking of Charlotte Mason's quote: "The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and babout how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has bore him? (vol. 3 p. 171, Like my post from yesterday, education like art expands and enlarges and broadens and bigs.) "All education is self-education," as Miss Mason says, and even though my primary objective was and is the education of my children, I couldn't help but learn (and in learning, find that I want to know and learn more and more and more!) in the process.
I am not a scholar or a professional at all, and so I struggle with direction an focus in my reading and knowledge exploration. (I have a post planned about this topic; it is something I think about almost daily, the benefits and drawbacks to being an amateur.) Even Frye knew this feeling. He says that "scholarship is as much a matter of knowing what not to read as of knowing what to read." As an independent learner with nothing higher than a high-school diploma, this is my struggle.
I'm not alone in this. One author worth mentioning is Ray Bradbury. In an interview in the Paris Review, found via this blog Bradbury says:
I'm completely library educated. I've never been to college. . . . And it's far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don't have to listen to anyone.
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.
The full quote on Goodreads
BRADBURY: Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”
This is my plan, which I know will take longer than one year, and probably even longer than the 2.7 years because I plan to make a range of success and not just a hit or miss goal. Because a lot of my reading time is taken with reading to my kids and prepping for my co-op classes, I want to hit this goal at least once a week. I don't honestly think I can consistently do more than that. Right now we are on Christmas break, so my reading time is more free and open, and the summer is luxurious in pace. I might even be able to double up on the plan, but we'll see.
Part of the personal goal of this plan is to read only what I already own. I have several collections of short stories and essays and lots and lots of poetry, so I don't forsee having to buy or borrow anything for at least the first year, probably longer. I'm also going to approach the "essays" broadly and include introductions or chapters of books that are not collections of essays. I also want to continue reading one Northrop Frye essay a week. His Anatomy in Criticism is comprised of 4 essays - 4 very, very long essays. But I would like to finally make it through all of them, and this challenge might help give me the framework to accomplish that.
My other reading goals are:
- continue reading poetry every day and posting one each day (this is covered by the Bradbury challenge, but I want to emphasize it as a personal, life long goal
- read more Russian Literature, esp. Dostoyevsky. I am currently reading The Idiot and want to read some of his short stories. Thankfully, Kindle has his complete works for about $2, so it's not like I have to make room on my already bowed bookshelves for more Russian tomes.
- read more about Russian literature: Wonder Confronts Certainty, by Gary Saul Morson and Lectures on Russian Literature by Nabokov, Dostoevsky by Anna Dostoevskya, and Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. I'd love to start War and Peace as well, and to reread The Brothers Karamazov with this group on Substack, but I probably won't be able to commit. I keep going back and forth - one book a month, it's not that much; you already have lots on your TBR shelf; yeah, but it's one book a month!; BUT LOOK AT THAT STACK!
We'll see. - I want to finish what I started this year, so Capon's Supper of the Lamb and The Solace of Open Spaces by Greta Erlich, hopefully before anything else gets started.
These books are like the golden calf of the Israelites that just jumped out of the fire (according to Aaron) when their jewelry happened to fall in - these books just jump off my shelves and into my hand and force me to start reading. *hands thrown up in the air* What's a reader to do?!
- Back to the M'Cheyne reading plan we go. I've completed it four times before, and it's just a good, solid reading plan. I also am going to try to make it through the psalms every month, but I am well aware that this is piling on an already towering reading plan. So, like The Brothers Karamazov reading group, we'll see.
- I haven't found a devotional book to read yet. I might fall back on Boethius, again, for the 3rd year running, which isn't the worst thing. I quite like Boethius. It's not like I'm at a loss of material; I have actual shelves full of theological books I haven't read and a dang good church library to choose from. I just haven't found the book I want to dive into yet. I think I'll probably go with whatever strikes my fancy whenever it strikes, which so far is nothing really, so it might be a recipe for disaster. If nothing else, there are always Lewis's essays. Maybe I'll finally finish Reflections on the Psalms to start out the year, or read all of his theological books, which I haven't even come close to accomplishing.
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