Mark Twain Project

If you're interested in Mark Twain, this website is a must-visit.  I stumbled upon the link on the California Digital Library page.  This could mean amazing things for the future of literary studies.

Here is the description from their main page:

Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

Its ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote. MTPO is a collaboration between the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, the California Digital Library, and the University of California Press.

Review - Rilla of Ingleside

Rilla of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables No. 8) by L.M. Montgomery

rating: 5 of 5 stars

The final book in the Anne of Green Gables series makes a solemn capstone to an amazing run. My Dad bought me these books when I was little on the condition that I read all of them, and I've just now fulfilled that promise.

Covering the duration of World War One, this book, along with Anne's House of Dreams, is definitely one of the saddest in the series. Yet these two books give the characters of Anne and her children, including the title character, her youngest daughter Rilla, a more rounded feel.

The story left me with a sense that the soul can bear a lot more suffering than any of us usually think it can. There is something terrible in that, since the last thing any of us want to experience is more suffering, but also something hopeful, since it helps us to understand that we can live through it and have a sense of happiness again. Maybe not the same unburdened happiness that we used to have--but happiness nonetheless.

Although the book dragged in parts (as I'm sure real life did in those times as people waited desperately for word of their loved ones at the western front), any book that so unapologetically forces me to read it in two days and makes me cry deserves five stars.

View all my reviews.

Review - The Beautiful Fight

So, after a couple of people have asked me over the past year, I've finally joined the social networking site GoodReads. Check out my page here. The good part about this is that it's prompting me to review the books that I read, which I plan on cross-posting to this blog. I hope that these reviews are beneficial to somebody and help to give me some more content here! So, without further ado, I give you...

The Beautiful Fight by Gary Thomas - 4/5 stars

This is a great book to remind Christians that just being in church is not enough. One of my favorite images that Gary evokes is that going to church or spending time praying are like a lunch break--they can be used to rest and restore people. But when the relaxing is done, it's time to go back to "work."

What is "work," in this case? It's continually evaluating our inner state and making ourselves available to God. It's learning to see with his eyes, hear with...more This is a great book to remind Christians that just being in church is not enough. One of my favorite images that Gary evokes is that going to church or spending time praying are like a lunch break--they can be used to rest and restore people. But when the relaxing is done, it's time to go back to "work."

What is "work," in this case? It's continually evaluating our inner state and making ourselves available to God. It's learning to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, and be his hands and feet in the world. We can't be arrogant or hateful and be living Christ-centered, transformed lives at the same time.

The other important issue Gary brings up is that Christians often focus far too much on the words "don't" or "shouldn't" and not on the words "do" or "should." Understanding that we have a loving God should inspire us to do the same for others--mere moralism is not enough. We have all failed to do good to other people and to ourselves too many times to judge other people for failing in the same ways.

Something that annoyed me about the book: It seemed that at least once per chapter, the author made a "please don't take this the wrong way" kind of disclaimer. His writing felt defensive to me because of this, as though he had to justify everything.

Overall, though, this book brings some great insights into how Christians should be treating other people on a daily basis, and what it means to do "the will of God" (it doesn't have to mean becoming a pastor or a missionary--it could mean just doing what you enjoy most and allowing God to shine through you in it).

Information Access & Retrieval

This is the class I'm taking this semester. So far, I'm not impressed.

My professor's clear communication of the expectations is admirable, but the expectations themselves are not--so, I have been busily living down to them. She doesn't expect us to read the assigned materials thoroughly, nor to understand most of the more difficult concepts in our textbook. The subjects she is lecturing on are things that I mostly learned in high school, or at least in my undergrad days, not graduate level material. Some of the things she's gone over I've already learned in my last class (which is mainly the fault of the program's structure, not the teacher herself). And her goal in guiding us through the process of writing our final papers seems to be to extinguish as much creativity as possible; i.e., if nobody's written about it before, we're not allowed to write about it.

Of course there are a few things I'm learning from it. It's been valuable to get exposed to a larger array of search engines, since I admit, I'm a Google-holic. And even if my final paper can't be at all innovative, either way I'll learn a lot about Natural Language Processing. In other words, there is a silver lining to this cloud. That, and we're already almost ten weeks into the semester, which is well over half done. If I can just hang on until May 7th, I'll be free and clear.

These are the kinds of classes that make me want to drop out, though. Completely unchallenging--but then, maybe I need some of that as I learn to balance married life, work, and school. At any rate, this summer I'll be taking the last required course, which I hope won't be too difficult since it's packed into a shorter session. Then, all I'll have left are electives. Woohoo! Genealogy, here I come.

My faculty mentor, who is a fantastic woman, thought that I should try and do an internship for 1-3 credits at a different kind of library. The only problem with this is that in order to do so, I would either have to do it at night or on weekends, take vacation leave for it, or take leave without pay. None of those is very attractive, especially the last one since my husband and I are trying to buy a house. I haven't talked with her recently, but we'll see what happens with that. I am thinking that right now it's not likely, although it would be interesting to get some time in a public library setting.