It is jolly good fun to always be talking about truth, goodness, and beauty. In fact, the more we talk about it--the more metaphors we use--the more romantic it becomes. Warm blackberries, babies' breath, raindrops on roses, and all that. This is fine and dandy on the Internet, but when you sit down with young moms in your own home you begin to blush.

One of the hardest things about getting older is the decreasing time ahead of you to catch up on reading. Even reading one hundred books a year for the next twenty years is not going to do it. I feel about my To-Be-Read pile as my husband does about the salaries of major league baseball players. He would have to work for one hundred and fifty years or more to make what some of those guys make in one year. It is not a hopeful thought.


By the time I had Timothy, my oldest, in 1984, I had already spent three years reading about homeschooling so when he turned four I was chafing to get started.



It is starting to get cold again which means it is reading (and gift-giving) season. And the perfect Christmas gift is a book to curl up with during that long, lugubrious week between Christmas and New Year’s.

This is going to be one of those thinking-out-loud-oops-now-I-look-dumb-never-mind-I-take-it-all-back posts.

I am still here. Even though my son Alex is in public school, I am still here. I am still looking at life through the lens of classical education.
Things have been going pretty well for Alex at school. I like his teachers and his classes and I have been pleasantly surprised at how much they care. Most of them really do care.
I put Alex in honors classes because I heard through the mom grapevine that the honors classes are not disrupted as much. Plus Alex is a bright kid in need of a challenge.

In a post on my old blog (the now defunct ordo-amoris.com) I wrote about how we are failing to give our boys a reason to learn, how boys are motivated by honor and how our society has left them without hope, and how one antidote to the problem may be using great literature to motivate our sons to pursue honor.
But what books should they read?