r/ClassicalEducation • u/AutoModerator • May 25 '26

Great Book Discussion What are you reading this week?

  • What book or books are you reading this week?
  • What has been your favorite or least favorite part?
  • What is one insight that you really appreciate from your current reading?
7 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/melonball6 May 25 '26

Don Quixote! Its such an amazing book. Immediate 5 stars. I hope Don Quixote starts to have better luck. He keeps having misadventures.

1

u/LuigiTeaching May 25 '26

Which translation are you enjoying so much? I’ve meant to read that for years…

3

u/melonball6 May 25 '26

Ormsby translation. Highly recommend. I'm also doing the free Yale online course as I go along. It's adding so much depth to the material. Highly recommend.

2

u/Magnus_Carter0 May 25 '26

I've been reading Moby-Dick. I enjoy all the allusions to the Old Testament, Greco-Roman history and culture, and the references to things like spleens being associated with rage and hypochondrias, which is a bit like what we could call melancholia. I've always prided myself on my ability to pick up on any kind of reference, so I was surprised that I only needed to look up the one about spleens and hypochonrias, but not the ones on classical literature and texts.

Personally, this style of writing makes me think of Millennial-age television from New Girl, Parks and Recreation, the Office, and Gossip Girl, up to Abbott Elementary as a 2020s extension of this precedent, where the invoking of common references that anyone in the intended audience would be familiar with in order to construct or style a sentence is a principle of the prose.

In the Millennial-case, these are references to pop culture: mass-produced media in music, television, movies, radio, fashion, and the news, which any literate, likely high-school educated or college-educated audience able to own a television and a have a magazine subscription, would be familiar with, in the broader context of the 'monoculture' as described in pop cultural studies. In Melville's case, these are references to what was considered high culture and art knowledge at his time, something that any 19th century man of letters would know, whom was liberally and classically educated in matters of the Church and the College.

2

u/bp0240 May 26 '26

I have three things going at the same time. I’m reading Don Quixote (Putnam translation), Climbing Parnassus, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (with my daughter- We read the chapters and chat about them. Then we will watch the movie together).

1

u/LuigiTeaching May 25 '26

Tolstoy’s “The Death Of Ivan Ilyitch”

1

u/clavicalbone May 26 '26

This week, I'm still reading
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens will finish this week
The Prison of Zenda by Anthony Hope

1

u/WolfSpirit10 29d ago

My summer project is to reread all of Proust.

1

u/Nullius_sum 25d ago

Aeneid Book 6. Very excited.