One of the subtler values in the flood of eReaders, and people who have then is the fact that there are so many classic available for free. I often wonder of this is enough of a motivation for some readers… At least once you get past the free Jane Austin…

For those who are interested in reading classics (the Greeks, Romans, and philosophers in general) but may feel a slight sense of intimidation and want to get some more context, I found a great post at Brainpickings.org (a great site with lots of thoughtful stuff…meaning that it can make you think…always a good thing!), which presented and reviewed some modern books which form a sort of bridge to many of the classics, as well as to provide a platform for daily reading into such areas as ethics, and how to live a life.

In 2011, we live in an age without existential anchors, a state that leaves many of us feeling adrift in our day-to-day lives. So goes the argument behind All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. Though the book is co-written by academics with burnished credentials, All Things Shining is intended for the general reader, as the authors note in their forward.

Anyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here. Anyone who wants to lure back the shining things, to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing… anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadness and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next.”

In Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey through Your Ordinary Day, we were taken on a highly enjoyable tour of the mundane accompanied by the Buddha, Max Weber, and a host of other great thinkers. The book flows chronologically through a typical day, beginning with a chapter called “Waking Up,” logically, since both Descartes and Kant preside over the process of getting out of bed.

Running on the treadmill is an occasion for the following observation:

So let’s say Foucault is right: the gym is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an overtly friendly club on a covert mission to monitor not just your heart rate but your general regularity as a subject. Now turn that argument on its head: the state wouldn’t need to keep bodies docile if they didn’t hold the power to subvert it, which is to reconceive the body as a political weapon, an agent of resistance.”

What we liked most about Breakfast with Socrates was its absorption in the quotidian aspects of life, since, as its epigraph from the writer Annie Dillard reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Where Breakfast with Socrates walked us through the diurnal, the new publication Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages through Books has nothing less than our entire lives on its itinerary. Its author, Arnold Weinstein, has been teaching literature at Brown University for more than four decades, and he brings a compelling intimacy to his subject.

In Morning, Noon, and Night something quite personal is at stake; namely, Weinstein’s own reckoning with the passing of time. His readings in the book’s latter half are particularly sensitive to the irrefutable phenomenon of mortality. To wit:

Baudelaire and Freud are cartographers of a special sort: they are alive to the temporal destinies of cities and humans. What they tell us, in their own way, are that humans are also historical monuments, replete with stories, memories, scar tissue, and the living pith of days and works.”

No survey of life lessons derived from luminaries would be complete without a pick from British writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. In The Consolations of Philosophy we get his well-established blend of wit and wisdom applied, most comfortingly, to the aspects of life that cause the most anxiety. In a chapter entitled “Consolation for Not Having Enough Money,” de Botton trades on the legacy of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus’s argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analyzed life, we will never truly be happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.”

5 Guides to Life from Cultural Luminaries
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/05/05/life-advice

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