Saturday Seven ~ Week 28

1:: Off to the annual family reunion, today!! (You know I have to say it: I have the best family!!)

2:: This has been a rillllllllly tough few weeks as far as parenting goes. I'm counting down the days until Boys' Camp. This will be my only year on my own. Then it's Girls' Party for baby girl and me.

3:: I have 3 million (really unexciting) projects planned for my days off, but I'll probably sleep instead.

4:: I still have a bunch of photos to edit. Tired of seeing wedding stuff, yet?

5:: Luke's stitches come out in a couple days. Wowsa, it is a pain to keep a little boy's hand clean and dry during the summer....

6:: My hip is out of whack and it's getting really uncomfortable. I think I'll add a chiropractor visit to my to-do list.

7:: Our thoughtful topic today is books (not much of a surprise around here).


*From The Medium is the Medium at The New York Times:

The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

*More book list fodder: Books for Boys and Other Children Who Would Rather Build Forts All Day from Institute for Excellence in Writing.


*And one can never go wrong quoting C. S. Lewis when books (or anything, really) is the subject:

"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."

Wishing you a life filled with endless books...