When I first got this book, I thought it was going to be a reasonably short read. It took me far longer than I anticipated, in part because it's quite dense and long, and in part because I was pretty lazy about my reading for the last month or so. I really need to start reading more! I have a lot of books I want to finish before summer ends, after all!
The focus of …
A soliloquy about the meaning of life...
I was drafting the mission statement for BinaryHeart (which recently became incorporated! Woo-hoo!), when I thought for a moment: Does my life have a mission statement? I suppose that is exactly what my English teacher is asking us to ponder with our 'Meaning of Life' project...
To be frank, I was originally planning to write my MoL about how it is somewhat useless to think about the question …
I read this book per recommendation, and I have to thank the person who recommended it. When I first decided to read it, to be honest, I was somewhat skeptical of how novel or useful the book would be: I expected it to just be another book preaching the importance of perseverance and hard work, valuable—but well-trodden—wisdom. Before reading this book, I thought I knew what “grit” was. Turns out I didn’t.
Duckworth’s definition of …
In class, we recently read Nietzsche’s essay on the “Geneaology of Morals.” Although Nietzsche’s very witty, and although his arguments, at least on first glance, seem persuasive, reading his essay made me ask a couple questions that I found simultaneously interesting and somewhat disheartening.
Basically, in his essay, Nietzsche asserts that the current moral system that values democracy and selflessness wasn’t the original moral system, but rather a reaction to the might-is-right morality that prevailed …
Finally, after several, several months, I have finished Confucius’s Analects. I wasn’t quite able to QPC all of it; it kind of became too much work after the first couple chapters. However, I did annotate all the way through, especially in highlighting all the passages that resonated with me the most—and underlining the passages that I didn’t understand or agree with for further reflection.
So, I decided that I would list here my favorite …
You know, I've always been really stressed about finals, but this year, it's been pretty smooth sailing. My grades were pretty solid going into my exams, so I didn't have to worry that much about how they would be impacted by doing well or by doing poorly. I'm glad once again that I kept up with my schoolwork this year—truly, 'a stitch in time saves nine.'
Anyway, I've been reading several books over the last …
I read the book once before when I was younger, and I’m very glad I read it again. I definitely didn’t understand it the first time. The plot is a bit all over the place, but that’s part of its beauty, I think: It adds to the mood of airiness, of the inconsequentiality of everything Daisy and Tom and Jordan and all their wealthy, listless friends do. The style of the writing is really incredible, …
A place for me to blog my essays, random thoughts, and about the books I read.
