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J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan

    This book was not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. I was sure going into it that it would be different from the Disney portrayal of the character. I had heard that it was darker than the Disney or modern portrayals, but even with that in view, this book was different than I was able to anticipate. I loved this book, plainly and taking into account the full view of history that surrounds it. I wept at the end. I have cried often at the end of books.    Books That Have Moved Me Deeply   Frankenstein  – I could not stop thinking about for days afterward. I loved that book deeply and truly in a way that I have not loved often in my life.    Donna Tartt’s  The Goldfinch  – this book got to me. I hated it, really did not enjoy quite a lot of this book, but ultimately it got to me. The scene with his mother in the end just hit me right in the heart.    W. Somerset Maugham –  Of Human Bondage  – Not even at the end of the novel, but elements of this book resonate with me stil
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Anonymous - The Maxims of Ptahhotep (Small Works List)

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text.  I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so I don'
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Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons (Big Book List)

  It is hard to say how deeply I was drawn into this text. It is also odd that I read   Peter Pan   during this month as the beginnings of both books want to establish that there is something else going on in these pages than meets the eye. Turgenev is doing something very different in his book, and he sets each element up like Bazarov’s laboratory in the Petrovich’s house. Turgenev asks the question, what do your own thoughts mean to others? Are we indebted to one another in a way that simply changing your mind can fracture a relationship? But ultimately, this book asks the question, what if you loved someone and they didn’t love you back? This is a deep concern of this book and one that I don’t think finds the positive resolution you might imagine an embarked upon theme like this would attempt.   I have tried to read this little book many times throughout my life, probably over the last 20 years I have picked it up and put it down. I set out to read this book as a young man simply be
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John Milton - Paradise Lost (Big Book List)

I decided to read Paradise Lost (as a randomized big book list entry) because a professor friend of mine has to read this text for his dissertation and so I decided to jump in here and read along with him. A history professor friend of ours also decided to read it with us and so I decided that is random enough for me, and jumped in.    I actually began reading Paradise Lost in the sort of ‘proto-list’ phase during the first Covid summer I thought that I would try to engage with some classic literature because Audible had a bunch of books for free then and we all needed something to do. I powered through Frankenstein , loved that, and the next book on the list for free then was Paradise Lost , I tried then but I just couldn’t get my head around it, and left it undone. This time we had a deadline and I thought I would really try to sink my teeth into it, and I am glad I did. I loved it. I went back to the audiobook but I took a different approach this time. I would listen to sections o
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The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur

 I hope that this project does not totally spin out of control with the endless introductions of new lists. I don't know how The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur got on my list. I imagine at one point I was skimming through the Norton Anthology of World Literature and there is some slight reference to it which may have been enough to prompt me to add it to an Ancient Literature list. I have no idea but I thought to add it as an Anonymous entry and leave it for 35 years from now. Now that I am a year into this project, many books and research questions have been asked I pull this strange text out of the ether and I confront it head on.  One of the challenges of selecting books based off of their titles alone is that many times there is not a collected, singular volume of a text available that I can simply buy online, listen to an audiobook version of and move along. This text was written somewhere between 2112 B.C. and 2004 B.C. according to Wikipedia (which seems younger than I
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Christopher Columbus - The Diario of Christopher Columbus First Voyage

This is probably the most research I have put into a Small Works List entry. It often happens that I have no idea who the author is and what they have written that is most significant. I am thinking here of Ki No Tsurayuki and trying to track down what he wrote inside of the Kokin Wakashu. Then I think about Guaman Poma whose name couldn’t have been more obscure from me, but it was clear what the document he would be known for. Isaac Newton also presented some problems for me to get a document that I could actually understand.    Christopher Columbus is probably one of the most famous, or infamous, people who ever lived. Towns, Countries, parks, statues, a national holiday that has recently been renamed (and for good reason), and there isn’t a clear book or text that he wrote? How odd is that? I did a bit of Googling and I found that Penguin Classics has a collection of documents that they package together and call it the 4 voyages. I ordered this book to find out th
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Anonymous - The Huarochiri Manuscript (Small Works List)

The next entry I pulled from the Small Works List was from what feels like the most popular list on that spreadsheet, the World Literature List 1000 to 1600. I have only pulled one other name at this point on the list but I have consistently been involved with World Lit from around this time period pretty consistently. Kadambari was on the list just before this one as well as Ki No Tsurayuki. The crazy thing is the connection between this text and Guaman Poma.    The Huarochiri Manuscript represents a strange node in the make up of this history of this time period, and also happens to be the second indigenous authored text from the same region and the exact same time period. So, let me lay this out for a second. Guaman Poma is one of the only native Incan authors in the historical record. Guaman Poma’s 1200 page letter to King Phillip III was lost for hundreds of years as it was accidentally stored in the Royal Danish Library. Guaman Poma would have written his “letter” in 1615-1616.
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