15 minutes a day with the Harvard classics

If I began on today April 18, it would be in Don Quixote, according to the guide and I would learn how the naming came about. So I would know 15 minutes more than I knew 15 minutes ago.

Here is the guide for reading 15 minutes a day.

And here is an English professor who tried it and found it quite useful.

A Year of 15-Minute Daily Doses From the Harvard Classics

“I discovered that a reading regimen, even if only 15 minutes a day, requires discipline. William James wrote that discipline is needed in the formation of any new habit. In this case, the habit was reading regularly and outside my comfort zone. I often had to fight against an inclination to skip a day. But the relative brevity of the selections kept me on track—a hint to teachers who assign too much and thereby encourage cribbing and cramming. With a 15-minute assignment, I could push on, knowing that the end was near.”  Paula Marantz Cohen, WSJ, Dec. 26, 2014

What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House by Tevi Troy

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15824285-what-jefferson-read-ike-watched-and-obama-tweeted

I was at Half-Price Books today and noticed this title on the Clearance shelf for $2.00.  I almost selected it because I like to read about readers. I looked at the chapter on President G.W. Bush, and was surprised to see the author got it right, whereas Bush detractors (most of the media) were totally off base.  Bush was an avid reader—he and Rove used to have competitions. 

Laura Bush’s recommendations

“Mr. Bush was more of a reader than many Americans imagined — he had reading contests with Karl Rove, his top political adviser, measured not just by the number of books finished, but the cumulative number of pages and even square inches of text. He was particularly drawn to Lincoln, reading 14 books about the Civil War president while in office.

His reading at times had impact. Natan Sharansky’s book “The Case for Democracy” helped inform Mr. Bush’s second-term focus on spreading freedom around the world.

And Alistair Horne’s history of the war in Algeria, “A Savage War of Peace,” taught Mr. Bush that more people died after the French withdrew — reinforcing his own reluctance to pull out of Iraq.

“Obama’s book selections have been harder to read,” said Mr. Troy, the author of “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted.”  Obama’s book list

President GHW Bush’s summer list

Bush’s last year and WaPo finds out he reads

Suggested reading, GW Bush

Summer reading for teens

Last night my neighbor asked me about summer selections for reading for her 15 year old grandson. He has a school suggested list with 2 books required. I have no experience in what teens read, but I was surprised by the list. Seemed awfully mature (and depressing). One was Killer Angels, an historical novel about the Civil War and is used in military schools; another was The Help, about black women who worked as household help in the South of the early 60s, but the narrator is white. The last runaway--an English woman and the underground railroad—which my book club read this year. I read a lot as a teen--mostly historical fiction, but probably not what adults suggested.

So I checked the Internet for summer reading lists. Although there were a few classics, many I found disturbing. Like the one about a boy who lives in a homeless shelter with his spaced out mother because dad is in prison; a 5 year old growing up in 1 room because his mother has been held prisoner for 7 years (like the Cleveland story); Devil in the White City (scariest book I've ever read). But then, Les Miserables and Uncle Tom's Cabin (also on the list) aren't a walk in the park

What are your children/grandchildren reading this summer?

The reading list wars

Whatever became of the "reading list wars?" Well, Obama pretty much lost that race/battle in 2009, back when the lapdog media were still presenting GW Bush as a dumb, ignorant, gaffe-prone ignoramous. Then when they stared checking things, Obama came out to be the light weight who didn't know history, political science, finance, business or religion, and wouldn't learn from history. He mostly read stuff written by other Democrats or himself. Also, over time, the media learned Obama couldn't even keep track of the words put in front of him by his writers on the teleprompter, and mispronouned or misspoke often. So the comparisons just weren't fun anymore, plus, it was all Bush's fault anyway, so why did it matter?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

Obama's safe schools czar--Kevin Jennings

You might want to read this. It's a porn list for children. From Maggie's Notebook:

Kevin Jennings, Barack Obama's failed "safe school czar" has a recommended reading list for children of all ages. What has been revealed is sick and perverted, and until you read this, you simply cannot image what Jennings recommends as appropriate for school children in this country. I implore you to read and pass it around. Contact Congress, your schools and specifically the White House.

More at Breitbart TV--teaching children about "fisting." Jennings, Obama's choice to lead us to safe schools, created the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Although supposedly GLSEN's mission is to discourage harrasment of gay children, it appears to any observer that its mission is to promote pornography and creating sexually ready children for men who like little boys. And who enjoys reading about first grade boys performing fellatio, other than older boys and men desiring boys? Sounds like child porn to me. Do we need this in schools?

Really, this administration is just a wiggling, squirming swarm of mischief and mayhem. You hardly know which rock to peek under next!