This post should have gone up on Tuesday, but I’m a bit behind this week. I did do a lot of reading over the weekend, but haven’t made much progress during the week.
Over the weekend, I made more progress in my Bible reading, nearly completing Genesis. One of the most troubling stories of the Bible was in this section. I’m always disturbed when I read the story where Abraham nearly sacrifices Isaac. This is one of the passages that is easy for non-Christians to point to as a reason to not practice Christianity. I know the story is supposed to teach us that we should be willing to sacrifice anything for God, but it’s still a hard story to swallow. The happy part of the story is that God stops Abraham from going through with it, showing His grace and mercy.
I also read chapter 1 of The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. I’m really enjoying his writing style and the photographs are wonderful. This chapter focused on ancient art and discussed the fact that while we might not view many of these items as beautiful, it’s interesting to examine them. Many of these pieces are amazingly detailed considering the tools they had available at the time. It’s also fascinating that they took the time to create this artworks. These people had to spend most of their time hunting, preparing food, and just generally staying alive and yet they created these pieces. Gombrich talks about how many of the pieces may have been used for teaching or spritual purposes. The drawings of bison in caves may have been used in a belief that creating the pictures and performing a ritual would call forth the bison. I usually just find these types of pieces interesting just because they’re so old and are still in existence, but this made me think more about the uses they may have had and
Finally, I made progress on my Shakespeare reading, completing both The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentleman of Verona. It’s good to know I can get through two plays in a day when I need to! Granted, these aren’t the most challenging of his plays and I was already familiar with The Taming of the Shrew, so that might not always be true. I will post separately on both of those plays soon.
I have quite the reading list for this weekend to make up for my lack of consistent reading during the evenings this week. In addition to the project books list I have way too many library books checked out and need to finish off a few of them as well. Even Ryan, my husband who normally ignores the large stacks of books strewn about the house noticed that I had a lot more library books checked out than I normally do. And his exagerrated guess at how many I had checked out was a little too close to the truth. He jokingly guessed 20; I have 18 checked out. And I just got another email from the library that I have two more reserves in. Oops. I hope to read as much as possible this weekend in between hockey games, dinner at my parents and doing my taxes, and watching the Oscars, which might actually be entertaining this year with James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosting. The plan is to read as much as possible on Saturday and then prepare posts on Sunday night during the Oscars. We’ll see how much I can actually get done.
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Posted in Project Books Update
