Words, Words, Words
A catalog of my comments and thoughts on books, reading, and writing as well as anything I come across that seems interesting. I used to sell other people's words at an independent bookstore but now I hope to get by on selling my own.
Better as an introduction than as a survey
I warmed up some on Edith Hamilton knowing what to expect in this one. I had gone into her hoping for a sort of primer on the ancients, to see if I might want to read further and where to start, but she was not the best choice for that. What Hamilton's books are good for is an introduction of sort. The Roman Way and its predecessor on the Greeks both read like something that assumed a reading of the discussed works either coming or just finished. She is reluctant to translate some of the writers and spends a great amount of time grading writers against one another, and I get the whole point of conveying the spirit of the two ways, but it definitely serves better as a lens to consider in your reading of Roman (or Greek) writers than it does at sharing useful knowledge about them. So, take my grade with a grain of salt, its heavily biased by my own aims.
