I love to learn. I want to know everything.
The latest delightful Wordle-inspired puzzle game is Redactle, "a daily browser game where the user tries to determine the subject of a random obfuscated Wikipedia article, chosen from Wikipedia's 10,000 Vital Articles (Level 4)."
I did pretty well on my first two attempts (game #10 and game #11). It takes me a while to solve them, though, so I'm not sure how often I'll take the time out of my day to play. Sure is fun, though.
Background: "Nature Publishing Group told the University of California that next year subscription prices would increase 400 percent, with the average annual cost of a journal increasing to $17,479. UC Libraries fought back with a combative letter to UC faculty suggesting that faculty should consider boycotting the journals, and cease submitting or reviewing articles for these journals." via Metafilter
936 pages.
Somebody recommended A History of the Modern World over on Ask Metafilter and I leapt over to the San Francisco library's website and requested it.
It's 936 pages. Not counting the (excellent-looking) appendices and bibliography.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I love cheap books. I go to thrift stores and library book sales and come home with boxes full of books I have no room for. Half my books (honestly, well over half my books) are in storage, waiting for me to bring them back home where I can read them.
And yet, I'm surrounded by books.
I daydream about reading all these wonderful books. I take small paperbacks to the bus stop with me - Teach Yourself French, A Brief History of Japan, The Portable Greek Historians.
My current approach to studying French is to make my way through some popular literature, picking up vocabulary words along the way.
I've found a number of Jules Verne works at Project Gutenberg, many available in both French and English. (I've seen several posts on one of the learning language forums reporting good results from reading a book in English and then in the original language. So far, I'm starting with the French, but I may change my mind.)
I decided to start with Around the World in 80 Days.
The problem with wanting to learn everything is that everything I learn makes me want to learn more of everything else.
I picked up some paperback Homer, both Odyssey and Iliad, at the big library book sale this year. Then, somewhere, I stumbled across a book called Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad. (I think I was just poking around in the library's online catalog.)
I finished chapter 5 (of 7) in this self-paced programmed music theory book. A lot of it is review of things I learned in piano lessons; I've been really happy to discover that I remember the major scales as well as I do. I did learn the functional names of the various chords: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading, and then back to tonic.
I have another programmed music course when I'm finished with this one. I'd like to supplement these things with Practica Musica exercises.