Writes Sebastian Castillo, in "The Secret to Getting Through Big, Dense, Difficult Books/Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal" (NYT).
The book club's first book was Spinoza's "Ethics." Castillo sums it up: "The book’s argument, supposedly, is that everything one needs for salvation is already at hand."
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8 comments:
I was really interested right up to the part about gender being a construct, then I remembered why I have twice tried book clubs, and twice quickly quit them. I lack perseverance when it comes to suffering fools.
This post is worthy of the "lightweight religion" tag.
"Deep and difficult", eh? For me, that was a 2-inch tome entitled Fundamental Electro-magnetics.
If their first choice was Spinoza, unless they dial it down to Oprah altitude, they may get to a second, but certainly not a third book in the "Club".
My Five brothers and I all read the same copy of Ron Chernow's big, dense, difficult biography: 'Grant'.
Holidays for us means swapping bags of books. Sometimes you'll get one of yours back. Clears out the shelf of deadwood, and saves on bullshit present buying.
Is that a book club?
The calculus book we had at West Point was called "The Black Death." It was known for the phrase "The solution to the problem is intuitively obvious to the casual observer."
No. It wasn't.
That book was the downfall of many cadets.
@Joe Bar
We used to call Organic Chemistry the "Killing Fields" of pre-med undergrads.
Ethics is the theory of moral relativity a liberal religion.
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