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Content from The Great Courses/The Teaching Company is all over the place. The Rick Roderick lectures from the nineties are some of the best shit ever. Some of it is really bad in terms of dumbing down or trying to produce pop academia. Or weird agendas I am too embarrassed to admit that I slogged through.

Elizabeth Vandiver is one of the better presenters in terms of saying which ideas came from where, which ideas are her own, while leaving room for people to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

I just came off of a super opinionated book, that I loved, about Greek tragedy by someone who is selling it hard but didn’t provide a lot of the detailed background that these lectures provide. So this is good to fill in the missing bits.

This is a really feisty and enthusiastic take on Greek tragedy.

I don’t want to spoil it but there’s a lot of great stuff about why tragedy is a worthwhile thing to read right now, how heroes and wars fucked up everything, and how Greek tragedy gave voices to the people most affected by this.

Sometimes he gets a little off track but he does a good job of reigning it back in.

@bognymph nice! I have “The Complete Stories” coming up soon as my first Lispector. Let us know how you like this one!

@peoplelikebooks I think it is normal now. I am going to keep going and see where I end.

Next year I am not going to set a numeric goal, I am going to try to read some things deeply, maybe: Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov, and Gene Wolfe’s Urth Cycle, and Le Guin’s Hainish novels.