Mer and I passed a milestone a few weeks ago, and I forgot to comment on it! After SIXTEEN months of listening on and off in the car, we finished The Teaching Company’s lectures on classics of American literature, all 84 lectures (42 hours). We finished up the lectures on one of our trips to see theater in Cleveland. I give the series a thumbs up. I did like the Shakespeare lectures we have better, but the overview of American literature was still very good. A few surprises came out of the course – I really liked what I heard on Emily Dickinson. Her stuff really impressed me, and I am not much of a poetry guy. I liked that the teacher, Prof. Arnold Weinstein, was willing to talk about books that are not in vogue in universities nowadays (according to Weinstein) – Frost, Hemingway, some Twain, James, and others. He also threw in some works that he considered important that are not usually read or discussed, like Melville’s Benito Cereno, which sounds really interesting.

Meredith has started re-listening to these lectures on her morning walks, and she is already through 42 of them! At this heady pace, she will only take about three months to go through the whole course.

Not to let our brains atrophy too much, yesterday we started in on the 24-lecture (12 hours) course on the Life and Work of Mark Twain. I’m guessing that should only take 4-6 months to get through!