![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thebuildersoftheworld.jpg\")
So I’m a little bogged in my disciplined reading these days–I try to do a section or chapter of The Life of Greece<\/em>, a couple or twenty things in the giant listicle 1001 Ways to Be Romantic<\/em>, and a chapter in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate<\/em> (somehow, trying to clear books from my chairside table has in fact added these last two books to the pile). So I thought I would prowl my stacks for some of the pamphlet-sized single short stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper<\/a>“, some short fiction that I could use to break up the current stream of nonfiction without committing myself to a full book and which I could count as a “book” for the annual total. But I came across a stack of “Instructor Literature Series” booklets from the early part of the 20th century. And this book was on the top, so I grabbed it.<\/p>\nIt’s a 29 page (including a quiz at the end) treatment of geology at the macro scale. The book talks about the then-contemporary understanding of the formation of the earth and its processes. I say then-contemporary because it only mentions igneous and sedimentary rock types, and although it does talk about slate and whatnot, it does not break these rock types into metamorphic<\/em> rock like we do today. And, the book has, if not overtly Christian, then certainly a Deist perspective as it mentions that God put this all into motion. <\/p>\n I looked a little into the history of this series, and it was a New York (state) guy who made, eventually, 350 of these titles available for school teachers. Inexpensive, compact, and a ready-made lesson (of various difficulty levels). Remember, in the days when these were published, one-room schoolhouses were still common and Horace Mann’s acolytes had not destroyed schooling. I imagine those hard-pressed teachers treasured these little books, and the search engine AI tells me they’re sought after by collectors, but Ebay indicates they’re not that rare.<\/p>\n So I’ll probably work my way through the stack so that I can refresh myself to 1910s-era knowledge as a break from The Story of Greece<\/em> which is 1940s-era knowledge (although history has not advanced as science might have). As a break from my little early 20th century hardback textbooks like the Riverside Literature Series<\/a> and MacMillan’s Pocket Classics which I’m also using as a break from other things, although in the case of Alexander Pope’s longer poems, I’m taking a break from them by reading thousand page eighty-year-old history books.<\/p>\n But I assure you that the stack of books on the side table is slowly diminishing. Glacially slowly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I’m a little bogged in my disciplined reading these days–I try to do a section or chapter of The Life of Greece, a couple or twenty things in the giant listicle 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, and a chapter in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate (somehow, trying to clear books from my chairside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35567","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=35567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35568,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35567\/revisions\/35568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}