First day of school

Even after I started homeschooling, the first day of school has always frighteningly exciting for me. Don't ask why...

This summer, we worked on fixing up this oddly-shaped room in our house, previously an office, and I'm using it this year as my "study" for schoolwork. My grandmother's old desk in our back porch and a bookcase from IKEA have been appropriated by yours truly for school purposes. ;-) That, with a window looking out to the front garden & street (you know, so that you can spy on neighbors unwind during 5 minute breaks) makes the room a very pleasant place in which to spend 8 hours of the day. In fact, I was so excited about it, I took a picture of it all nice and clean before I started school this morning:

I'm still incredibly embarassed about that list of 24 books I made out last year......this year's is 15. And since I know you're dying to see what's on it, here ya go -

• Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
• Machiavelli, The Prince
• Luther, The Bondage of the Will
• 2 Shakespeare plays (Hamlet & A Midsummer Night's Dream)
• More, Utopia
• Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
• Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
• Milton, Paradise Lost
• Swift, Gulliver's Travels
• Edwards, A Narrative of the Surprising Work of God
• Voltaire, Candide
• Paine, Common Sense
• Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
• The Autobiography of Ben Franklin 

So right now I'm reading The Praise of Folly, Erasmus's satire on the foolishness of the ostentatious scholars/rulers/clergy of his day. Well, knowing that Erasmus wrote it, I was quite petrified to read it. You know, it's just going to be a bunch of illegible Renaissance Humanism. As it turns out, however,  it's actually very funny! There were several times today that I laughed out loud (I have a total weakness for dry, sarcastic humor). Need proof?

[Folly is speaking] "In general I think I show a good deal more discretion than the general run of gentry and scholars, whose distorted sense of modesty leads them to make a practice of bribing some sycophantic speaker or babbling poet hired for a fee so that they can listen to him praising their merits, purely fictitious though these are. The bashful listener spreads his tail-feathers like a peacock and carries his head high, while the brazen flatterer rates this worthless individual with the gods and sets him up as the perfect model of all the virtues - though the man himself knows he is nowhere near that; "infinity doubled" would not be too far away." (p. 11)

The "infinity doubled" phrase did me in. Please tell me you laughed too. :-)

All in all, I pronounce this to be a very good first day of school. Let's hope the rest of the year is half as enjoyable.