The CSW faculty is comprised of men and women who share a deep passion for continued education through intellectual and leisure reading. We would like to continue sharing with you some of the titles our faculty are reading or have recently finished. This is the fourth installment of this series.
D. P. Fahrenthold
Ossa Latinitatis Sola by Reginaldus Foster
The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The Nature of Things by Lucretius
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Jen Bookhout
I am currently reading The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. I am approximately half-way through this World War II saga. It is the story of a young Hungarian Jew who begins attending an architectural college in Paris shortly before the beginning of World War II. It follows him and his close friends through the Jewish experience in World War II. It is fascinating and horrifying—I am having a hard time putting it down to do all the things life requires of me.
Josh Dyson
Reading with the kids currently: The Magician’s Nephew by CS Lewis and North or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson
Dan Snyder
I’ve just finished The House of the Seven Gables. Whew! Gothic.
Peter Green’s Alexander of Macedon — a terrifically detailed, researched, and authoritatively opinionated book that combines the available sources into an impressive portrait of the catalyst of Hellenism.
I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino — historical fiction concerning Frederick Barbarossa and his failed crusade. The Name of the Rose is on the reading list for eleventh graders (by the same author), and is a fun mashup of historical characters and medieval scholastic debates with linguistic puzzles.
I finished The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Anyone wanting to be ‘well read’ should have this on their reading list. You will recognize it as the source of any twentieth century documentary you have ever seen concerning Germany and ‘der Fuhrer.’ Having read the Ian Kershaw two volume Hubris and Nemesis, I am feeling like an annotated cross reading of these two works to get a feel for a conversation between these authors. You should start with the Schirer before joining in the more recent readings.
Coming in the mail today: Polybius. A prominent member of the Achaean league, he was carried away by the Romans during the third Macedonian War with Perseus. From there, he narrates the coming to power of Rome — thereby detailing its militaristic conquest of the Mediterranean. This period (218 – 146 BC) benefits from Polybius’ contemporary witnesses of the wars he reports, from the second and third Punic wars, the annexation of Greece and Macedonia, and the beginnings of the fall of the Seleucids. This makes a great companion to Josephus Antiquities, and the books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha.
Livy: Readings mostly in books 31 – 45. This goes along with Polybius. Livy writes at a much later date, his career spanning the collapse of the republic, he is a client of Caesar Augustus, and records the Roman side of things. We will be reading books 21 – 30 in 10th grade omnibus after the break, concerning Hannibal and the second Punic War. Seventh grade will be reading books 1 through 5 dealing with the foundation of Rome and its republic. (This ends up being something of a civics class.)
Also, we [some of the faculty] are reading Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger. I’m reading it in German.