A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, volume I: 62% Complete

My apologies for going so long between updates.  I'm really enjoying A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.  Churchill's writing is funny, engaging and opinionated.  I do a lot of my reading in between classes at school and a couple of times, I have nearly laughed out loud while sitting in my classroom.

 

There haven't been many vocabulary words that I haven't known, but I do have one for you.  The word is "hypocaust" which is "a hollow space under the floor of an ancient Roman building, into which hot air was sent for heating a room or bath"  (definition from The New Oxford American Dictionary).  I was familiar with this concept, but I didn't know that word for it.

 

I have run across so many quotes which are entertaining or interesting or both, but I have to choose a few to share with you.

 

First, from the beginning of the book, as the Bronze Age gives way to the Iron Age:

 

"At this point the march of invention brought a new factor upon the scene.  Iron was dug and forged.  Men armed with iron entered Britain from the continent and killed the men of bronze.  At this point we can plainly recognize across the vanished millenniums a fellow-being.  A biped capable of slaying another with iron is evidently to modern eyes a man and a brother.  It cannot be doubted that for smashing skulls, whether long-headed or round, iron is best."

 

(On a side note, shouldn't the plural of millennium be millennia?  But who am I to correct Churchill...)

 

On the subject of King Arthur:

 

"And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round."

 

Could it be that perhaps Churchill saw himself as a second Arthur, if you will?

 

In the next quote he has just related a rather romantic (in the older sense of the word) story of a love triangle involving Henry II, his wife Eleanor, and a woman simply called "Fair Rosamond."

 

"Tiresome investigators have undermined this excellent tale, but it certainly should find its place in any history worthy of the name."

 

I love how Churchill, while writing a history book, puts the excellence of the tale above the "tiresome" factual history.  He seemed to be rolling his eyes in disgust at anyone who might suggest that this story didn't actually happen.

 

And lastly, not a quote, but an interesting tidbit.  I was, of course, familiar with the name Plantagenet, applied as a sort of surname to the kings and queens of England from Henry II to Richard III.  But apparently this name comes from the emblem of Henry II's house, the broom (plant, not cleaning instrument specifically), which in Latin is called the planta genesta, literally broom plant.

 

Before I close, I want to send out my sympathies to all those affected in the bombings in Boston and the plant explosion in Texas.  May you be embraced by peace and comfort.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Beginning

The next book I'm going to tackle is A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill.  (N.B. On the cover of the book, there is no hyphen between "English" and "Speaking;" however, as there should be one and as it does appear on the title page, I will be putting it in.) For some reason there is no copy of this book for Kindle, as far as I can tell.  Fortunately, the Seattle Public Library has them so I am borrowing them from there, in hard copy. This gives me a chance to use the lovely bookmark my sister gave me for Christmas. (One of the few downsides to Kindle, I've found, is that you don't get to use bookmarks.) 

 

The book was originally written by Churchill (who was, of course, prime minister of the United Kingdom during and after World War II) in the 1930's.  It's publication was delayed by the war, however, and it was not published until the mid-1950's.  The book is four-volumes long (although there is an abridged, one-volume version available) and covers the history of Britain and it's former colonies from the invasion by Rome in 55 BC to the beginning of the first World War in 1914.

 

The book tends to focus mainly on military history and political movement, rather than social or economic history.  Another British prime minister, Clement Attlee, suggested that the book should have been titled, "Things in History that Interest Me."  Nevertheless, the book has endured the test of time for it's judgment of war and politics and for Churchill's lively writing style.  It was one of the books mentioned when Churchill won his Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

This is a book I've been interested in reading for a long time but have put off because of it's length, but I'm excited to begin.  Because I will be reading each volume separately, and because I don't know the page lengths of all the volumes, I will report my progress through each volume as a percentage of that volume's total length, not a percentage of the whole book.

On the Origin of Species: 100% Complete

Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples came in at the library, and I was so excited to start it that I buckled down and finished Darwin over the weekend. 

 

I also had some good news this week! I got a job as a certified nursing assistant at a retirement home and I found out I got accepted to nursing school beginning in the fall! So I'm going to try to do a lot of extra reading between now and September so I will have a little wiggle room once I start nursing school.

 

Overall, I enjoyed this book and I understood more of it than I expected to.  It did seem to be a little repetitive occasionally but not annoyingly so.  I found Darwin's rather conversational writing style refreshing.

 

The final vocabulary word from this book is "fecundate" which means to fertilize.

 

One thing I enjoyed about Darwin was his rather "grass-roots" experimental methods.  In my biology class last quarter, my teacher shared a story about Darwin putting dead birds in his bathtub full of salt water to see how long they could theoretically float in the ocean before sinking.  In some cases, he had rotting birds in the bathtub for more than a month or two.  I can just imagine how enthusiastic his wife was about that.  So when I came across this passage, I once again pictured Darwin conducting his "experiments" with his characteristic enthusiasm:

 

"In the course of two months, I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds, out of the excrement of small birds, and these seemed perfect, and some of them, which I tried, germinated."

 

Next up: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples!

On the Origin of Species; 56% Complete

I'm still plugging through.  Despite my initial cockiness, I have to admit I'm understanding less and less of this book as I work through it.  But I do understand some and those parts at least are still interesting. I put a hold on the first volume of Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples at the Seattle Public Library (it's not available for Kindle), so I want to wrap this book up so I can start reading that when it comes in.

 

The word of the day is "fecundate" which means to fertilize.

 

I have another interesting story for you that Darwin tells:

 

"One of the strongest instances of an animal apparently performing an action for the sole good of another, with which I am acquainted, is that of aphides voluntarily yielding their sweet excretion to ants: that they do so voluntarily, the following facts show.  I removed all the ants from a group of about a dozen aphids on a dock-plant, and prevented their attendance during several hours.  After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete.  I watched them for some time through a lens, but not one excreted; I then tickled and stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as well as I could, as the ants do with their antennae; but not one excreted.  Afterwards I allowed an ant to visit them, and it immediately seemed, by its eager way of running about, to be well aware what a rich flock it had discovered; it them began to play with its antennae on the abdomen first of one aphis and then of another; and each aphis, as soon as it felt the antennae, immediately lifted up its abdomen and excreted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was eagerly devoured by the ant.  Even the quite young aphides behaved in this manner, showing that the action was instinctive, and not the result of experience.  But as the excretion is extremely viscid, it is probably a convenience to the aphides to have it removed; and therefore probably the aphides do not instinctively excrete for the sole good of the ants."

On the Origin of Species: 48% Complete

I was getting a little bogged down in Darwin so I took a little break (gasp!) and read something a little lighter and not on the list; namely, Tina Fey's wonderfully funny and insightful autobiography: Bossypants.  (Favorite quote: "We drove out of town a little ways, listening to Peter Gabriel's 'In Your Eyes.'  [He] played that song constantly. He was very deep. Did I mention yet that he always wore a small shell necklace and he told me that he was never going to take it off until Apartheid ended?")

 

When I started this project I promised myself I would take a break now and then to read something newer, lighter and funnier than most of the books on the list, so I don't get too far behind and emerge from the wreckage at the age of 30 with no idea what had been written in the last six years.  So it was fun and now I'm back to Darwin again, refreshed.

 

The word of the day isn't a word at all, but rather a phrase Darwin mentioned.  My meager Latin skills weren't quite up to the task of translating it, but luckily Wikipedia was much more helpful. The phrase is "Natura non facit saltum" which means "Nature does not make jumps."  On a philosophical sort of Sunday morning a few months ago, as I was lying in bed, I noticed this phenomenon: that large, dramatic changes in nature are rarely beneficial; that real, meaningful change takes time.  Of course there are all sort of personal, deep, philosophical implications for this, but mostly I was just excited to find that I wasn't the first person to notice this.  Perhaps it was a bit egotistical of me to suppose that I might have been the first, but at least I'm not totally batty.  Yet.

 

One of the things I'm loving about this book is all the examples Darwin puts in of the various things he is discussing in nature.  He has, apparently, a vast collection of stories and observations about nature floating around in his head waiting to be linked to a phenomenon and many of them are fascinating things I never knew about.  For example:

 

"As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm;  if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought: so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed only up to the third stage, the caterpillar simply reperformed the fourth, fifth and sixth stages of construction.  If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work."

 

First of all, I loved the notion that the caterpillar was "embarrassed" that the work was already complete.  And secondly, you'll notice that whole section is only two sentences.  You've got to love nineteenth-century Englishmen and their astounding sentence construction.

On the Origin of Species: 15% Complete

I'm actually enjoying this book a lot more than I thought I would.  For school I've been reading some scientific journal articles and they're mostly dry, complicated and full of jargon and terms I have to look up to even sort of understand the piece. I sort of expected this book to be similar in some ways. But Darwin's writing is poetic, passionate and almost chatty.  I can feel Darwin's excitement and enthusiasm about the subject coming through and reading this book feels like sitting down around a fire with a cup of tea and chatting with him about his ideas.  He often has to check himself as he becomes too excited and begins to ramble on.  For example, this line: "I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations."  Scientists do not write like that now.  Some things I have read about this book have complained that Darwin's lack of writing experience comes through and makes the book harder to read, but I think that is one of the things I like about it.  He writes as he probably spoke, rather than writing as a professional writer.  Sure, his style could probably be improved, but the somewhat rambling nature of the book is really enjoyable from my point of view.

 

I have no vocabulary words for you today.  Darwin actually has a surprisingly small vocabulary for someone that is ingrained in a particular field (now days you almost need a whole second language to understand scientific speak).  The terms he doesn't have, he coins, but they are quite self-explanatory.

 

One thing that I have found almost distressing is how Darwin didn't have access to the research done only a few years later by Gregor Mendel.  For those of you who don't know, Mendel was an Augustinian friar who is often called, "the father of modern genetics."  Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel did some ground-breaking work on genetics by studying pea plants.  He was the first to really begin to understand genetic inheritance including dominant and recessive traits.  Although his work was published in Darwin's lifetime, there is no evidence that Darwin ever read it (it was not initially well-received) and he certainly could not have read it before he published On the Origin of Species.  It seems a shame to me that he didn't have access to this information that could have explained so much for him.  Take, for example, this paragraph:

 

"The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor; why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes or to one sex alone, more commonly, but not exclusively to the like sex."

 

While reading this, I just want to yell at the page, "Yes! We do know why those things happen! If only you knew, Darwin, if only you knew!"

On the Origin of Species: Beginning

The next book I'm tackling is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (or just On the Origin of Species for short!) by Charles Darwin. I'm taking (well, just finishing) a cellular biology class this quarter and we have been discussing some of Darwin's theories, etc. in class so I felt this was a good time to read this one.  We have also been studying Mendel's theories of genetic inheritance, information which Darwin did not have access to at the time he wrote this book, but which would have helped him to explain some of the mysteries of genetic transmission that he didn't fully understand. 

 

Charles Darwin was twenty-two years old when he took the post of naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle which sailed from England to explore South America in 1831.  The evidence Darwin collected on this trip, specifically his study of the finches on the islands of the Galapagos, was influential in establishing his future theories.

 

Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and although it was not the first suggestion of natural selection or of this process of evolution, it was one of the most influential on the scientific community. 

 

One funny anecdote about him: ever the methodical person, when he was contemplating marriage to his future wife Emma, he made a list of pros and cons for marriage.  Under the pros column, he wrote "constant companion and friend in old age...better than a dog anyhow" and under the cons: "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time."  Evidently "better than a dog" outweighed the loss of money for books!

 

Charles Darwin died in 1882 of congestive heart failure.  I'm sure I don't have to tell you how influential his work has been on the world or why I chose this book for the list.  An Examiner review of the book from December of 1859 says, "Much of Mr. Darwin's volume is what ordinary readers would call 'tough reading;' that is, writing which to comprehend requires concentrated attention and some preparation for the task. All, however, is by no means of this description, and many parts of the book abound in information, easy to comprehend and both instructive and entertaining."

A Room with a View: 100% Complete

I did it! I finished A Room with a View.  For whatever reason, I really enjoyed the second half, after finding the first half really dull.  I'm glad I suffered through it, though, because the characters, the settings, everything seemed to come alive in the second half.  It suddenly seemed like things were happening when before, it seemed like nothing was.  I would be curious to know if anyone else has had this same experience with this book or if it's just me. 

 

Now that I'm finished, I wanted to go back and start over, because I started to notice that Forster peppered the story with a few choice words that seem to hold a lot of symbolism, most notably the words "room" and "view."  I think he meant "room" to represent convention and proper place in society: the place of Lucy's fiance Cecil.  She says at one point that she always pictures him in a room.  The view, which first comes into play when George Emerson and his father give up their rooms (which have views) for Lucy and her cousin at the Italian hotel where they are all staying, is representative of passion, of breaking out of the rules of society.  I didn't notice these reoccurring themes until I was three quarters of the way done with the book, but once I did, I wanted to go back and start over.

 

I don't have a vocabulary word today, but I do have a couple of quotes which were funny and made me laugh and one which I found very insightful.

 

First, the problem of Cecil, who is conventional, but annoying:

 

"He had been rather a nuisance all through the tennis, for the novel that he was reading was so bad that he was obliged to read it aloud to others.  He would stroll round the precincts of the court and call out: 'I say, listen to this, Lucy.  Three split infinitives.'"

 

And the traveling Miss Alans:

 

"They always perched there [in Bloomsbury, England] before crossing the great seas, and for a week or two they would fidget gently over clothes, guide-books, mackintosh squares, digestive bread and other Continental necessities.  That there are shops abroad, even in Athens, never occurred to them, for they regarded travel as a species of welfare, only to be undertaken by those who have been fully armed at the Haymarket Stores."

 

And finally, a quote in which I found a great deal of truth:

 

"It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, 'She loves young Emerson.'  A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious.  Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome 'nerves' or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire."

 

I especially like the line: "Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice."  How true.

 

So up next? On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

A Room with a View: 64% Complete

I got quite a bit of reading done this weekend, so I'm past the halfway point in A Room with a View.  I must say, I'm enjoying the second half of the book quite a bit.  The book, for those of you who have not read it, is divided into two parts, the first part taking place in Italy, and the second part back in England.  In the first part it felt like the characters did lots of things but nothing really happened, if that makes any sense.  But the second part, so far, is much more engaging.  So I'm enjoying it a lot more.

 

The word I have for you today is "pourboire" which means a tip.  Literally it's French for "money for drinking" which I suppose is what a tip usually is anyway, right?

 

One thing I enjoy about this book is how E. M. Forster is constantly poking fun at British sensibilities, particularly their feelings about class and proper social positions.  I have two quotes for you today that illustrate that, I think.  First:

 

"Miss Bartlett had asked Mr. George Emerson what his profession was, and he had answered 'the railway.'  She was very sorry that she had asked him.  She had no idea that it would be such a dreadful answer, or she would not have asked him." 

 

And secondly:

 

"'You ought to find a tenant at once,' he said maliciously.  'It would be perfect paradise for a bank clerk.'

'Exactly! said Sir Harry excitedly. 'That is exactly what I fear, Mr Vyse.  It will attract the wrong type of people.  The train service has improved--a fatal improvement, to my mind.  And what are five miles from a station in these days of bicycles?'

'Rather a strenuous clerk it would be,' said Lucy.  Cecil, who had his full share of medieval mischievousness, replied that the physique of the lower middle classes was improving at a most appalling rate."

 

(On an unrelated side note, I always get a twinge of pride when I spell check my entry and the day's vocabulary word comes up as misspelled when I know it's not.  It just proves that it's a word most people don't use.)

A Room with a View: 27% Complete

I fear my apologies for lack of updates are beginning to sound a little hollow, so I will forgo.

 

I haven't done a lot of reading lately for whatever reason, but I have done a little as you can see.  I'm still liking A Room with a View although I'm over a quarter of the way through the book and it still seems like not a lot has happened.  She witnessed a murder, but that's about it.

 

Anyway, the word of the day is "desideratum" which means "something that is needed or wanted." (definition from The New Oxford American Dictionary)

 

E.M. Forster's writing is often perceptive and poetic, something I'm enjoying.  I love those moments in a book when you read something and say to yourself, "Ah, I am incredibly familiar with that concept, only I have never thought it through in so many words."  I have had several of those moments in this book.  One I liked was this quote, in which Lucy and George Emerson end up spending a few moments (scandalously!) alone together in Italy.  Forster writes,

 

"She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment.  He did likewise.  There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship."