{"id":16458,"date":"2017-04-12T12:13:46","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T17:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=16458"},"modified":"2017-04-12T12:13:46","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T17:13:46","slug":"yesterdays-reading-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/12\/yesterdays-reading-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday&#8217;s Reading in Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, yesterday, I read the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A little bit of Plato&#8217;s <em>Phaedo<\/em>.\n<li>A portion of the Akkadian myth of Marduk and Tiamat.<\/li>\n<li>The first half of the <em>Tao Te Ching<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Alien Legion #10<\/em>, an Epic\/Marvel comic book from 1985.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Geez, I feel like I am in college again.<\/p>\n<p>Except I wasn&#8217;t that diligent about reading in college.  A couple illustrations:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One semester, I tried to keep up with the reading, briefly.  I was taking six classes of philosophy and English, so it amounted to about 200 pages <em>per night<\/em>.  That meant I got up at five, worked a couple hours at the grocery store, went to classes, went back to work at the grocery store for a couple hours, went to a campus even sometimes, and then came home to read until midnight.  I did this for two weeks my junior or senior year, and I kept up with the assigned reading.  But I realized if anything made me fall behind, I would never catch up.  So I went back to my normal pattern of keeping up with the classes and picking and choosing the texts to read.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>One day, I was standing in the English department, leaning against a wall waiting for a meeting with a professor, when Russ Reising, the literature professor, came along.  I was reading <em>The Blithesdale Romance<\/em> as I stood there, which I was supposed to already have finished for his class.  I held up the book so he could see I was reading it, and he looked over the top of it to see where I was, which was not far into it indeed.  &#8220;Almost finished,&#8221; I said, slamming the book closed to hide how untrue that was.  Later in class, he said, &#8220;How about the ending, Brian?&#8221;<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>One semester, I took a course on Ben Jonson, the playwright contemporary to Shakespeare, and (predictably) I fell behind in the reading for the class, so in the week leading up to finals week, I read a play a night (which wasn&#8217;t too bad&#8211;it wasn&#8217;t 200 pages a night, but it was a bit of a slog).  The last class before the final, he said anyone who had an A in the class already could skip the final, and, as it turns out, I did.  The A was on the basis of comparing Jonson&#8217;s play <em>Sejanus His Fall<\/em> to Machiavelli&#8217;s <em>The Prince<\/em> and to show how many of the rules Sejanus broke.  Apparently, and unbeknown to me, the professor had written a book similar to my paper, and I didn&#8217;t come across it in my research.  Because, face it, my research was to take things I&#8217;d already read in other classes and apply them to topics of the current class to streamline my paper writing and research.  I didn&#8217;t go looking for scholarly work on it.  As it turns out, my reading was not required.  But it comprises volume one of a two-volume set of Jonson I picked up later, so I only have to read the second when I find it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Not included in yesterday&#8217;s reading: <em>Perfect Dark: Initial Vector<\/em>, a book based on the video game series that I picked up after Perfect Dark was the answer in a trivia night a couple weeks ago.  My mother-in-law asked me on Sunday what I was reading, and I&#8217;d just started that paperback.<\/p>\n<p>So if you ask me what I&#8217;m reading, the day that you ask me is apparently very important as to whether I give the impression of a well read scholar or a garden variety geek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, yesterday, I read the following: A little bit of Plato&#8217;s Phaedo. A portion of the Akkadian myth of Marduk and Tiamat. The first half of the Tao Te Ching Alien Legion #10, an Epic\/Marvel comic book from 1985. Geez, I feel like I am in college again. Except I wasn&#8217;t that diligent about reading [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16458"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16460,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16458\/revisions\/16460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}