Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The Love of Learning

This week I had the opportunity to read David McCullough's The Love of Learning, a speech he gave to the graduating students at Boston College. I loved it. If anyone wants to listen to it, you can do so here. Many of you have probably already heard or read this speech, but I wanted to share a few of my favorite pieces from it.

"If information were learning, you could memorize the World Almanac and call yourself educated. If you memorized the World Almanac, you wouldn’t be educated. You’d be weird!"

“'I cannot live without books,' Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams late in life, knowing Adams would understand perfectly. Adams read everything—Shakespeare and the Bible over and over, and the Psalms especially. He read poetry, fiction, history. Always carry a book with you on your travels he advised his son, John Quincy. 'You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.'”

"And please, please, do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation. I’m talking about the relentless, wearisome use of the words, 'like,' and 'you know,' and 'awesome,' and 'actually.' Listen to yourselves as you speak. Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, 'Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually.'” 
(Guilty as charged... I'm working on it.)

"We’re all what we read to a very considerable degree."

He also stated this statistic: "In a single year, according to the U. S. Department of Education, among all Americans with a college education, fully a third read not one novel or short story or poem."

Yikes. Not even one? I can't even imagine going a full year without reading anything, but I guess not everyone enjoys reading... weird-o's. (just kidding!)

So, I want to know: What are you reading lately? Or what is something you've read recently that you would recommend? I want to read good books, so I can be filled with good things!

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Last 10 Books I've Finished (Joe)

In order of most recent to least recent--

1. The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman (Recommend)
2. Christ And The New Covenant by Jeffery R Holland (Recommend+)
3. Super Freakonomics by Steven Leavitt & Stephen Dubner (Don't Recommend)
4. Holes by Louis Sachar (Recommend+)
5. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis (Recommend)
6. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (Recommend)
7. Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring by Henry J Eyring (Recommend+)
8. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (Recommend)
9. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (Recommend)
10. A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami Haruki (Don't Recommend)

Next up for Book Club: Dracula by Bram Stoker

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