And now a word from our sponsor... Kidding, but I am going to promote a website.
Several months ago, a friend introduced me to Open Culture, a collection of free course lectures online. It's wonderful. The site features hundreds of courses ranging from Hannibal to car design to game theory to the Lord of the Rings. At first I figured these would just be lectures by some randos who think they know everything about string theory, but they are all taped lectures by professors at legitimate universities, mainly elite universities like Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley. To top it off, this is the advantage of school without any homework or deadlines. You can randomly pick to watch one lecture on a topic you like - say The Birth of Jazz - or you can go through an entire course of lectures on Jazz and Culture at your own pace.
A few of us decided to start the course on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. While we were originally going to read and watch the lectures on the same time schedule, that plan quickly disintegrated. Now, we are all just going at our own pace (I'm definitely the slacker of the group). This set up gives some structure to my reading, which other than book club choices tends to jump all over the place. It also has forced me to try some new books, like Hemingway's In Our Time, and re-read others, like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In addition, the lectures provide background and analysis by a Yale professor that I probably wouldn't search out on my own. So seriously, go check it out.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...
Hellz yeah!
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