Richard's Poor Almanac by Richard Thompson for November 25, 2016

I enjoyed A Separate Peace, but I understand now that if you weren’t a fairly complacent white guy when you read it, the angst is a lot thinner and it’s harder going.

Every other summer I add Lord of the Rings to my list. It needs to be re-read often. That the manga of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Should have been a uranium “A-bomb”.

When my English teacher told me that a book I liked, Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Advise and Consent” in her opinion, took a long time to say little, I replied that I thought “A Separate Peace” (one of her favorites which she made the whole class read) took a moderate amount of time to say nothing.

Ooooh, Ulysses! I remember that sidekick, Steve Daedalus!

But somehow the plot seems a little different from what I recall….

The books, themselves, are usually great to read. Teachers and professors who “teach and explain” about them actually seem to downgrade those books in an attempt to impress students with the teachers’ “superior academic knowledge.”

I remember when we had to read Wuthering Heights in school. Man, was it dry; you needed a scorecard just to leep the plot straight.

My yardstick for the literacy of English teachers is this. We read “Heart of Darkness” at Beserkely in the 1960’s. Yes, that place, then. And with all the talk about colonialism and oppression in those days, we did not hear ONE WORD about the genocide in the Congo at the time of the novel. Not one.