Great intellectual journeys you've taken

Cafe Society
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Ever read a group of books that were all either related in content that gave you a enlightening or dynamic view of a given topic, or books that had different subjects but provided the facts and philosophies for you to play Connect-the-DotsTM between them? What books did you read? Can you describe the different thought going through your head as you read along? What conclusions did you draw for yourself? Are you still on your journey? What do you plan on looking into next?

I’ve been learning about our school systems lately.

I started off with 1984, which was a great book I almost regret having read. If I was the kind of person that acutually had dreams and nightmares that I could remember, I would have had nightmares for weeks on this book. The idea of such a government coming into power is a terrifying thought, and one that is entirely plausible.

After that, I read A Different Kind of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto, which made a good deal of comparisons between our school systems and…wait for it…1984! And at times when he didn’t make comparisons, I made my own. Gatto’s views seem a little crazy, but I couldn’t help but agree with him. Public school systems don’t even begin to live up to what they’re capable of, they seperate people from work and from their family, and they make kids read the same boring books filled with mangled “facts” and dumb people down. While reading this book, I couldn’t but help think of all the books I’ve read that have expanded my imagination, intrigued me to find out more about a historical figure, or enlightened me, and how poor school text books compared to the books I’ve picked out for myself.
A particular five minutes I remembered from the sixth grade that included me sitting in class, and thinking to myself “Why am I reading about how people in Hawaii pick coffee beans and about all the different terms they use? I know as a fact I’m not going to remember this crap. this is a waste of time. Why the hell are we reading this?” came to mind. It wasn’t the first time I thought that, it wasn’t the last, and I can’t but help think how much better I’d be off if I had spent my childhood reading better books.

By the time I was done reading ** A Different Kind of Teacher**, I’ve noticed several similarities between our world and the one on 1984. If a rule is made, people often assume there’s a reason for it and instantly adapt to it, and anyone who casts a weary eye is subject for ridicule, as though some great, thorough debate had been held on the topic and everybody was sick of hearing about it.

Now, I’m halfway through Lies My Teacher Told Me, which deals with the inaccuracies in school textbooks, and why our history books are boring and use selective history. Historical figures are turned into two deminsional stick figures so Americans can fell good about themselves, the books cover as much ground as possible to sell and are unable to give as much coverage to certain events as there should be, and controversy is removed because hostory is just full with all kinds of offensive facts and happenings. The book then goes on to debunk everything history books got wrong. Very interesting.

All of this has gotten me thinking about the Goth subculture, as well as the emo fad. It seems to me people are beggining to suspect that we have a rather conforming society, but rather than reacting to it in a practical manner, they wear black clothing, thick framed glasses, and write bad poetry. People are trying to stand out, but insist on doing it by looking different, rather than exposing themselves to new philosophies, concepts, ideas, and so on and so forth. Just my two cents on that matter.

My next book on the list is Bowling Alone, which isn’t about education (or the lack thereof), but about the breakdown of communitys in America. this interests me because I have a very hard time making friends and meeting people, and I’ve noticed that a great deal of people hardly even know who their neigbhores are. This doesn’t have any obvious relations to the other books I’ve been reading but I’ll be quite suprised if I’m unable to draw lines from the former subject to this one.

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My mind doesn’t work that way.

When reading a book, my thoughts will often go off at a tangent about something in the book. Then I’ll read a book about that. Like I read a collection of short stories by some guy, and tango is mentioned, not important the plot or anything, and I go off reading a book about the history of tango. Then I read that book, then get the idea to get a book to brush up my Spanish. Then I’ll read something about the Spanish civil war. Then something unrelated by Hemingway. Then something Scottish, because I associate Hemingway with whiskey drinking. And so on.

Note: this is a made up example. It’s rarely even that coherent.

So all my reading is basically like that, but it wouldn’t make much sense to anybody else. Or even to me, in retrospect.

But I admire those who can pull it off. A good friend of mine read through all the famous dystopias and utopias. I’d love to do that, but I just know I’d be sick of ideal societies after the first book.

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Well, I wanted to get an impression of Chinese culture from the source, so in a few months I bought and read the Analects of K’ung Fu-tzu, the Dao De Jing, the Book of Zhuang Zi, the Romance of The Three Kingdoms (wonderful!), Dream of the Red Chamber, and in the end all of the Voyage to the West. All interspersed with history books, of course, or I would have really lost the thread.

Translations in Italian were not really good, being translations from English, French or German rather than directly from Chinese, so whenever I could I stuck to English translations.

Not exactly what the OP wanted, but close enough…