The Humanities

So, this blog is mostly about my Humanities class. I've mentioned elsewhere that the reading list for this class is enormous, being something like 100+ books, but thankfully only some of them are required. My mom, since she's the one who's teaching the curriculum, would probably have all of them assigned to us, but we could only obtain a third or so of the assigned books, so we'll have significantly less, much to the joy of my classmates and I.

For this class, though, we'll basically always have a book to read, but every day we also have to journal about that book. We have to write down our thoughts on it, what's happening at that part in the story, or stuff like that. It's really simple, being just a required 200 words every day pertaining to whatever we're reading, but I figured if I ever have some really outstanding thought about one of the books, I might as well post it here, as well, just so you all can share in my...whatever-ness.

Right now, I'm reading Silas Marner by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), which, just in case you didn't know, is about a guy named Silas Marner. He's a linen weaver, who at the time that the story takes place, is somewhere less than forty years old, though not by much.

Anyway, he's a recluse, who suffered rather a nasty betrayal when he was a young, church-going man, and as a result, he is now somewhat bereft of any purpose in life other than weaving linen and hoarding his money, which he loves. Note that: he loves his money. The first forty pages or so of the story are all just warm-up, basically prologue--it really begins somewhere around page 50 (out of 185 pages), when a rather-richer man named Dunston Cass burglarizes his small house and steals his money, which he's been saving for the last fifteen years.

The loss of fifteen-years worth of money is rather devastating to Silas, but it softens the nonexistant relations between him and the villagers of Raveloe, of which he lives on the outskirts. For fifteen years, he's been the distrusted person that all ailments, broken legs, and other such bad luck have been blamed on. When his money is stolen, though, people begin to sympathize with him and see him as more than just a crabby, stingy man, as he has a somewhat-old and worn appearance after fifteen years of doing nothing much more than sitting at his loom and working the day away, and of course, no rustic villager would be so foolish as to believe that such a condition could occur naturally and by perfectly simple and non-supernatural means.

Anyways, he ends up a little more associated with the community, but still somewhat of an outcast and loner, not really fitting in. That's about where I am right now, after an hour or so of reading. Tomorrow, I will finish the book, unless something else happens.

I'm also reading Empire by Niall Ferguson, which is about how the British Empire affected the modern world, but while I could blog about that, I'm only on page 25 (I have to go at a limited pace), so I won't, beyond saying that so far it's really interesting (much more so than Silas Marner).

Today I had my first Spanish lesson for school, and it looks to be a breeze, especially considering that our accents already surpass our teacher's, who has a horrendous American accent, though she speaks Spanish almost fluently. I'm really thinking that I'm going to enjoy that class.

And also on the plus side, I'm enjoying my English, Geometry, and Physics classes as well. Humanities looks like it's going to end up dumping a lot of work on me, so I'm not sure how much I like it. :D

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Just so that this update isn't entirely about school, I'm just going to say random things about myself. And no, I'm absolutely not copying Melda's idea. I always say random things. ^_^

This last Friday I had a fun sleep-over with a friend who's been in the USA for the last 9 months, and just got back a little over a week ago. It would have been an all-nighter, but his parents don't enjoy it when we stay up all (or even most) of the night, so we ended up sleeping from around 3:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Well, I did. He slept for another half hour after that, obstinately drifting back off to sleep after I woke him up. <_<

My mom still has a ton of books for me to catalogue for our library, which I'm not at all looking forward to, but she still wants me to do other stuff as well in my free time, like cleaning BERC with my sister. >_< That takes a long time, and makes it really hard to make good use of my time on A-U.

Oh! I almost forgot. On Saturday night/Sunday afternoon I read a book called The Iron Lance by Stephen R. Lawhead. It's something over 300 pages long, I think it's actually somewhere between 400 and 500, and it was good. It's Book I of a trilogy called The Celtic Crusades, which is, as per Lawhead's style, something of aReligiously-Mythological Historical Fiction, if that makes any sense. Note--by Religiously, I mean Christian. Lawhead is a Christian author, and that's been incorporated into every one of his books that I've read.

Unfortunately, he does include a bit of sexual content into his stories, which could just as easily have been left out, and rather confuses me--it doesn't really seem to fit in with the Christian style of his novels.

Anyway, the other books that I've read that he wrote were The Sword and the Flame, which is from his Dragon King trilogy. It was okay, but geared towards younger readers (12-14). Actually, I was technically in the age-group it was geared towards, but my reading level has never been the same as my age, so it doesn't really matter. Now, that book was perfectly clean, just about what you'd expect from a good Christian author. I've also read Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur from The Pendragon Cycle, which is an absolutely incredible trilogy. Well, it's not really a trilogy, since there are two books that were latter added, but for a while it was. I still have to read the most recent two, which don't feature the main characters that the other ones had--Grail and Pendragon. They both sound really interesting.

So, Lawhead really likes incorporating Briton culture into his works, it seems, as in, pre-Saxon era. His researching skills are incredible, because he comes up with all of the old Briton names for now well-known locations in England, and I'm at a complete loss of where he finds all of that info. For instance, somewhere, he dug up the word "Saecsen," which he uses in place of "Saxon," but I've never been able to find it (online, at least) in any reference other than The Pendragon Cycle. However, given the factual nature of the other, similar terms that he uses in his books, I tend to think that that is an old name for the Saxons. It's been commented about him before that if he could write as well as he could research, Tolkien would be left in the dust. It's probably true, actually.