April 2016 Ernest Cline is the author of two science fiction novels: Ready Player One and Armada. Ready Player One was both his debut novel and is my favorite of the two. It takes place in a dystopian future, and most of humanity escapes into the virtual world […]
This essay was part of the 2016 Deal Me In Reading Challenge, where I read a short story, essay, or poem every single week. Each item on my reading list was assigned to a playing card, and every Friday I picked a card at random […]
This essay was part of the 2016 Deal Me In Reading Challenge, where I read a short story, essay, or poem every single week. Each item on my reading list was assigned to a playing card, and every Friday I picked a card at random […]
The Odyssey is book #4 from The Literary Project. The Odyssey opens with the following: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” The man, of […]
I’ve always imagined having a wonderful waking routine where I carve out a half hour each morning to read in my pajamas, espresso in hand, and the sound of the morning birds chirping just outside… But I can count on one hand the number of times […]
The days of deep reading are over…for most, anyway. The internet is a wonderful thing, and yet most of the technologies that have sprung up as a result of it are fragmenting our time and attention; the result being very real, tangible changes to our […]
The Iliad is book #3 from The Literary Project. “Iliad” means “a poem about Ilium” (i.e. Troy), and The Iliad is one of the world’s most well-known narrative legends. Most everyone has heard of Troy and of swift-footed Achilles. Although he doesn’t enter battle until […]
There’s a push today to focus American education purely on pragmatic, specialized study. To learn a trade and gain job-specific skills. To increase student enrollment in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. A liberal education? What’s that good for? “It’s useless,” seems to be the […]
If you haven’t heard of The School of Life, you should check them out. They’re a an educational organization that makes fun and quirky videos in an effort to “answer the great questions of life with the help of culture.” With a vast array of […]
“To study literature is to study what people thought, did, believed, suffered for, and argued about in the past. This is history.” ~Susan Wise Bauer [emphasis added] Alongside The Project, I’ll be reading Bauer’s The History of… series in parallel. Bauer writes the chapters themselves […]