Crack The Book: A Beginner's Guide to Reading the Great Books

This week I’m considering two spiritual classics from very different traditions: the Bhagavad Gita and the Rule of St. Benedict —well, sort of. Due to a packing mishap and a limited bookstore selection, I ended up reading Benedict’s Way , a modern commentary that includes excerpts from the Rule , rather than the Rule itself. Not ideal, but still worthwhile. I also tried a technique I’ve used befor...

This week’s reading was A Thousand and One Nights , also known as The Arabian Nights . The backstory (very, very briefly) was that a king, upon finding his queen to be unfaithful, executed her, and declared himself done with women, sort of. Every night, a new woman was brought to be his queen. Every morning he had his vizier execute the poor unfortunate girl. One day the vizier’s own daughter Sche...

This week, we take on Apuleius’ The Golden Ass , a hilarious surprise from Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course. Written in the mid-300s A.D., this is the very first Latin prose novel, penned by Algerian-born Apuleius. Lucius, our hero, is a young man who meddles in magic, transforms into a donkey, and embarks on wild adventures before returning to human form. We were so captivated that note-ta...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Before we start, though, we talk about graduation speeches...and share the graduation speech we wish we'd heard. Next, we journey from Western literature back to ancient China to explore two timeless texts: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (c. 500 B.C.) and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c. 400 B.C.), roughly con...

This is such a great book!! In this episode, my son Jack joins me to examine The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a Roman scholar living just after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE. A renaissance man before the Renaissance, Boethius translated Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, served as a trusted aide to the Gothic king Theodoric in Ravenna, and was a mathematician, astronom...

In this episode of Crack the Book, we take a look at Week Fourteen of Ted Gioia’s Humanities Course, covering Virgil’s The Aeneid (Books 1–2), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 1), and selections from The Portable Roman Reader . The focus is on key texts from Roman literature, their historical context, and their connections to earlier Greek works, providing an overview of their content and significance....

The Honest Broker’s Humanities Course shifts to the Middle East and Persia, exploring the Quran (circa 800 A.D.) and the 13th-century poet Rumi, before returning to Rome next week. The reading, kept under 250 pages, includes 14 of the Quran’s 114 surahs (1-5, 12, 17, 18, 32, 36, 55, 67, 103, 112) and self-selected Rumi poems. New to both texts, I approached them with curiosity, trusting the curato...

Can you be scandalized by a 2000-year-old book? I think I was with Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars , a gripping, gossipy account of the first twelve Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Written around 120 AD, Suetonius’ work (part of The Honest Broker’s “Humanities in 52 Weeks” list) blends history with salacious details, offering a vivid, if dark, portrait of power, excess, and moral d...

Episode Overview This week, I consider the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Epictetus’ Enchiridion , part of Ted Gioia’s Humanities List (link below!). Moving from Greek dramas to 2nd-century Roman Stoics, we first talk about the move from Greek lit to Roman, how the mindset and history will impact what we read. I cover Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus in depth, mention Admiral St...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Reading a familiar text in a bigger reading list like this offers its own special challenges. I start with a little insight about what to do when that happens. I think the best way to talk about these very familiar books is to take them one at a time. Then I have some thoughts about translations (a...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Ted listed SIX Greek dramas for this week:  Bacchae  (Euripides),  Lysistrata  (Aristophanes),  Agamemnon  (Aeschylus), and the three Theban plays from Sophocles,  Oedipus the King ,  Oedipus in Colonus  and  Antigone . We discuss how to read drama...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. This week’s reading was the Egyptian  Book of the Dead . Somehow I did not get Ted’s recommended translation by Susan Hollis. Instead, I had the gigantic and very, very  beautiful reproduction  of the complete  Papyrus of Ani . This edition had a huge influence on my week "in" E...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. This week I tackled the Epic of Gilgamesh  and also  The Dhammapada .  Gilgamesh  was written in approximately 2000 BC, the oldest known story in the world, and is about 1500 years older than anything I’ve read to date. The Dhammapada is the oldest writings of the Buddha, from a...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. An interesting combination this week.  Ted Gioia , the creator of my reading list, called it “Love and War,” but it felt like a lot more than that. And last week, I called it a hodgepodge, but I can admit I was wrong. Plato’s  Symposium  is the third of Plato’s works on this list. Af...

I'm reading and talking about Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Ethics  is the most challenging reading I’ve done, possibly ever. I’m not sure if it’s because I am out of the habit of reading deeply, or my attention span rivals a gnat’s, or if this text is actually that hard, but I pushed through. After reading about virtue, and habit, and endurance, and c...

This week we travel to ancient China with  The Analects  of Confucius — a book that’s equal parts wisdom, discipline, and quiet rebellion. Like the New Order song, it’s all about finding  true faith  in a messy world: not religious faith, but faith in virtue, order, and the hope that we can still live rightly, one deliberate choice at a time. First,  The Analects  is...

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. We continue with the Odyssey this week. I'm joined this week by my son Jack Drury. Jack is pursuing a Masters in Classics at the University of Chicago, so we are on familiar ground for him here. I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my ke...

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. Week 2 starts with Greek Poetry, and then we start Homer and The Odyssey. What a great week! I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my key take-aways from this week: The surviving Greek Lyrics are very male-dominated, full of war and fight...

I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Immersive Humanities Course," 52 weeks of World Classics. We start with Plato! The Last Days of Socrates and excerpts from The Republic. I'm a beginner at reading the classics, but I've decided to just "crack the book" and get started. Here are a few of my key take-aways from Plato: Human nature just doesn’t change. The distinction between an Idea (maybe think of it as a q...

A NEW ADVENTURE. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the thought of diving into those classic books you feel like you should have read by now, but don’t know where to start, Crack The Book is for you. I’m your host, Cheryl. I stumbled upon a list of classic books and realized how much I’d missed. I wanted to understand these stories and ideas and didn’t know where to start. But I was tired of feeli...

While we take a little break, enjoy this episode from last year. We interviewed our boat broker Michal Bach and learned a lot. If you enjoyed this interview, check out some of our other guests: JB Turner on August 6, 2024, Kate Seremeth on September 10, 2024, and Ali Hasell on November 26, 2024. Buying a boat is easier said than done. And finding the right one isn’t that simple either. Thankfully,...

While we take a little break, enjoy this episode from last year with our chef Vanessa! And if you enjoyed this episode, she also shares life at a charter yacht show. Check out that episode from November 19, 2024. Are you feeling hungry? You will be after listening to this episode! Vanessa Verster, our chef on board our sailboat, Abide (and Roland’s wife), joins me on this episode to give us a behi...

While we take a little break, enjoy this episode from last year. And to continue to part 2, check out the episode from July 2, 2024. We love a challenge. And this story is all about jumping in head first. In episode one I uncovered the story of how our adventure began, from the first time Bill and I went sailing, to coming to own a 136-foot sailboat. If you haven’t listened to episode one already,...

I’m making some changes to Adventure On Deck. Over the past year, this podcast has been a space to share stories of adventure, discovery, and our life aboard Abide. And I thank you so much for being a part of this with me. But as all great stories must, this chapter has come to a natural close, now that we’ve told the refit story. During our adventures, I’ve discovered how much I love how stories...

Have you ever read a book that feels like it was written for the exact moment you’re living? That’s how I felt when I read Homer’s Odyssey during our last trip to St. Thomas this year. The story of the epic, 20-year journey home has stuck with me, and I couldn’t help but see the parallels to our adventures aboard Abide. That’s why in this episode, I’m sharing 5 of these parallels that we’ve learnt...