In Common is my weekly Commonplace roundup – notable quotes from the previous week, and current reading list.

This has been a hectic week at home, and so I haven’t made as much progress, page wise, as I had planned for my weekly schedule. But I did manage to make significant progress in my fiction read, Waking Gods, and got off to a good start with A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe.

This week I worked through the Introduction in A Beginner’s Guide, and it was pretty awesome.

This is also not just a book for reading, but for doing. I have ordered a geometry set to use as I work through the book (and my kid’s aren’t allowed to touch it!). I know we have compasses and set squares for use in our math lessons, but I want a set all my own, for my own scholarship.

“Both Pythagoras and Plato suggested that all citizens learn the properties of the first ten numbers as a form of moral instruction.” A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe

I am finding this book goes along well with my other read, The Fourth Turning, which examines recurring cycles that occur in human history.

“When the lessons of symbolic or philosophical mathematics seen in nature, which were designed intro religious architecture or art, are applied functionally (not just intellectually) to facilitate the growth and transformation of consciousness, then mathematics may rightly be called “sacred.” A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe

 Most of my May reads are my “slow and steady” titles, but I have The Beginner’s Guide, as well as a couple of fiction reads I hope to get to this month.

Current Reads:

• Educating the Whole-hearted Child by Clay and Sally Clarkson
• The Life-giving Home by Sally Clarkson (one chapter a month)
• In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton (one essay a week)
• The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe
• The Well-educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
• A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe by Michael Schneider
• Waking Gods by Syvain Neuvel
• Survival Mom by Lisa Bedford
• Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide by Rosemary Gladstar
• Women Living Well by Courtney Joseph