Archive for 2019
Why read?
May 3, 2019
The following is the most heartfelt writing I have met in a long time that makes a case for why we read, written by Alain de Botton, a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. “We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well. But they don’t. Even those who love us get us wrong. They tell us […]
Your life story
March 26, 2019
I just had the pleasure of teaching Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl which is a book that can’t help but influence how you see life as it poses the all important question that the best of literature asks, what is the meaning and purpose of a life? Here is the quote that framed […]
Farsighted
January 29, 2019
Farsighted: How we Make the Decisions That Matter Most by Steven Johnson points our attention to one more benefit of being a reader of literary fiction. His book suggests that reading literary fiction can improve decision making, Novelists draw out the complexity of their characters’ inner lives and fictional situations help us to see decisions […]
John Steinbeck and a 2019 Aspiration
January 1, 2019
From John Steinbeck—worth pondering “There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to […]