Monday, August 5, 2013

The Education of Henry Adams

     Delycia and I are reading "The Education of Henry Adams" for a Classics Book Group that we recently joined, and it is one tough read so far. I find I have to reread sentences and whole paragraphs on every page, just to be sure I'm getting at least a little of what the author is saying. His sentences are marvelously smooth and elegant, and I don't get the feeling that he was "showing off" or being pretentious as he wrote, but still, the thoughts sometimes seem to be buried beneath layers of his silky, expressive sentences. 
     Adams positively hated school. At one point he wrote, speaking of himself: "He always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away."

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