another weekly reading update

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]All right, so I had a lot of fun last week doing my first ever weekly update video that I know of. So, I'm going to continue this weekend with my second weekly update.

[00:00:10]And today we'll talk about five books.

[00:00:12]The first two being books that I finished this week. The next one being a a long ongoing read. The fourth book is a book that I started this week, haven't finished. And the fifth is just a book that I picked up from Goodwill.

[00:00:27]Um so, we'll get started with the two books that I finished this week.

[00:00:31]The first being one I talked about in my most recent YouTube video.

[00:00:38]That is Song of Roland by unknown.

[00:00:43]There's no known author >> [clears throat] >> for the Song of Roland.

[00:00:46]And check out that video if you want to see a longer uh talk about the book. It's like 15 minutes or something.

[00:00:53]Uh this is a medieval French epic. It's [snorts] heralds back to It It was kind of written down in the 11th century AD and the lat- the final updates were added to it around like 1115 AD uh in France.

[00:01:12]Uh but it heralds back to a disaster that happened during the reign of Charlemagne in which the rear guard of Charlemagne's army was crossing the Pyrenees and they were set upon by an ambush.

[00:01:24]And a lot of Frenchmen, Frankish people at that time, died including main character Roland. Uh and this recalls that battle with some propagandic twists that change some of the players and make this a more epic, a more comedic just ironic. It it It's totally serious, but it's kind of roll your eyes when you're reading this. Um but this is a Penguin Classic translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. I had a good time with it. It's just I don't think it's like one of the top-tier epic poems, but uh if you're interested in epic poetry or French history or anything like that, Song of Roland, Penguin Classic.

[00:02:15]It's out It's all right. It's average.

[00:02:18]Uh Next book that I finished is not a novel or a non-fiction book. It is a play.

[00:02:29]And this play is based off of one of, if not, the greatest novels of the 17th century or one of, if not, the greatest novels ever.

[00:02:42]That would be Don Quixote.

[00:02:45]Which is all the way up there. As I'm not going to go reach for it now, but this is a play.

[00:02:51]This is called The Man of La Mancha.

[00:02:54]Written by Dale Wasserman with lyrics, it's a musical, by Joe Darion, and music by Mitch Leigh.

[00:03:04]Now, I had never heard of Man of La Mancha. I'm not a theatergoer.

[00:03:10]But, apparently, this was Hang on.

[00:03:17]It opened in 1965.

[00:03:20]And it was, according to the introduction, one of the biggest hits in New York theatrical history.

[00:03:27]Now, can I confirm that or are they just tooting their own horn? I don't know.

[00:03:32]Any theater people, let me know.

[00:03:34]Um But, of course, very slim. It's a play with no intermissions.

[00:03:42]Uh including the preface and the introduction, this is 126 mass-market pages. Um so, less than 1/10 of the size of Miguel de Cervantes' uh, thousand plus page novel Don Quixote.

[00:04:01]Uh, but you see here you got Don on Rocinante uh, going to fight the windmill.

[00:04:11]And this play I found this at Goodwill like months ago and it was just languishing on my mass market paperback bookshelf. And it's so short that I never really had an itch to read it.

[00:04:27]Um, but a few nights ago I couldn't sleep uh, for a long time. So I went up and picked it off the shelf and I just read the whole thing at like 2:00 a.m.

[00:04:37]And this really surprised me. I thought it was incredibly done.

[00:04:44]We of course you have to pick and choose how to do a, uh, small adaptation of a large novel.

[00:04:54]And I I might be brief here because I I might want to dedicate a full video to this. But Man of La Mancha it does a play within a play thing where it seeks to combine the essences of Cervantes and Don Quixote the character into like a, kind of like fuses them together a little. But the play within the play is the stage is set in that Cervantes has been thrown in prison. He's like mid-40s or 50 at the time.

[00:05:30]Uh, but he's been been sent to prison by the the Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition.

[00:05:35]And during this captivity before the Inquisition comes to, um, interrogate him.

[00:05:44]Uh, he gets to interact with the other prisoners and they try to burn his his prized package, which turns out to be the manuscript of Don Quixote.

[00:05:55]But, during this these capers in the prison, he decides to defend himself by setting up a a play for them, and all the prisoners act in it. It's a little farcical, but they get into it.

[00:06:11]It's cuz it's fiction.

[00:06:13]And within the play, he does a couple Well, he does the life of Don Quixote.

[00:06:19]Uh if you've read the novel, and you read through this, you'll be like, "Oh, they only they only do the events of the first sally."

[00:06:29]That's the the first expedition of uh Don Quixote and Sancho, his loyal servant, friend.

[00:06:38]Um So, there's only the first couple of escapades. You have the uh the windmill, of course, and the main the main events are set at the castle, where the inn with the innkeeper and the muleteers.

[00:06:55]And the This Man of La Mancha really puts an emphasis on the Dulcinea character, where they kind of combine the the Well, they they they give a greater role to Aldonza, the the woman that Don spies from afar, and labels as Dulcinea. She gets uh included in the the the innkeep the inn castle plot.

[00:07:28]And there's a big emphasis on her character and how Quixote and his erratic, quixotic nobility affect her as she she's a prostitute in this. She's or she's the prostitute of the inn in this as well.

[00:07:48]Um But I for for such a small play, that it really I thought it really hit home the themes of Don Quixote, especially like illusion and nobility and uh how you see the world or is how or how you want the world to be versus how you act in the world. It's really great. Of course, I recommend Don Quixote more than this, but if you want a little taste of Don Quixote or you you wanted to reread it for a while, but it's just so long.

[00:08:25]I don't even know if this is in print, but Man of La Mancha is really good.

[00:08:29]And the songs, I listened to the songs when they came along. There's an original soundtrack, at least on Spotify, probably YouTube, too, or wherever you get your music. Uh but they're 98% aligned to the lyrics in the book.

[00:08:46]So, that was really fun. Every time we would hit one, I'd pop it on just to hear uh the voices while I was reading.

[00:08:56]Um And that was super fun.

[00:08:58]Uh great songs.

[00:09:00]But yeah, Man of La Mancha, surprise hit for me.

[00:09:07]Okay.

[00:09:08]Um Book three, one of my ongoing projects, which I have been reading this since the first week of January, and I don't think I've talked about it for whatever reason.

[00:09:20]But that is the old Holy Bible.

[00:09:25]We got the Penguin Classic.

[00:09:28]It's called the Bible, King James version for me.

[00:09:32]I've read in another version before.

[00:09:34]I've never finished the Bible, though.

[00:09:36]Uh but I started in January and I'm here this being the front, I'm here.

[00:09:43]Um I just finished or I'm in the middle of the book of Chronicles, the first book of Chronicles in the Old Testament.

[00:09:53]Now, I'm not going to get into the Bible or the history of the Bible or whatever.

[00:09:57]This past week I read probably Kings 1 and Kings 2. Those are two books of the Old Testament.

[00:10:08]Uh and those deal with King Solomon building the Temple of Jerusalem and then falling out of God's favor.

[00:10:18]Uh and then the uh the splitting of the kingdoms of Israel into Israel and Judah and then the various wars that they fight between each other and between outside kingdoms and then the kings of Israel do evil in sight of the Lord and some of the kings of Judah do and they're punished.

[00:10:41]Uh and the book of Kings ends with Well, first, a couple centuries earlier, the Assyrians uh capture the kingdom of Israel, Judah holds out and then a couple centuries later in like 500 something BC Judah is uh conquered by Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar.

[00:11:04]So, that's where I ended off this week's reading.

[00:11:08]For reference, I'm 500 pages into this uh almost 2,000 page book.

[00:11:18]So, I'm a quarter of the way there, which is exciting, actually.

[00:11:23]That's that, the Bible.

[00:11:26]Ongoing project, secret project.

[00:11:31]Okay.

[00:11:33]A book I started yesterday so probably be another ongoing project, but that is Bulfinch's Mythology.

[00:11:44]Thomas Bulfinch in the 19th century wrote a big old work of myth.

[00:11:52]This combines three or he wrote three separate books of myth and they were all combined into Bulfinch's Mythology.

[00:12:00]This includes the Age of Fable, the Age of Chivalry, and the Legends of Charlemagne.

[00:12:05]So, the Age of Fable mostly Greek and Roman myth.

[00:12:10]The Age of Chivalry mostly Arthurian legend.

[00:12:14]The Legends of Charlemagne uh curious curiously not like Song of Roland related, but these are the he goes after the Italian ballads like uh Orlando Furioso and some other guys.

[00:12:31]I think that those are the sources he draws on for the hearkening back to Charlemagne's time. But it includes a lot of the events I think from Song of Roland or talks about Roland of course cuz Roland is Orlando.

[00:12:45]Um but yeah yeah I actually just started this yesterday. So, I'm I know a lot of the Greek and Roman myths, but it's nice to get a refresher and I really love how Bulfinch wherever he can quotes from the great uh English or Western poets like Shelley, Keats, Milton, Dryden, whoever.

[00:13:13]Like whenever they reference or they reference an allusion or something he'll quote the poem or wherever they wrote about this mythological character or this event or something.

[00:13:28]So, I'm 50 pages in right now. This is 950 pages. It's a big boy.

[00:13:37]But, I'm really enjoying Bulfinch's writing. I I think I'm enjoying his writing more than Edith Hamilton who did Mythology, which is just mostly Greek and Roman myth rewritings.

[00:13:50]Which I I like that as well, and I actually read that last May. So, this might be a coincidental like mythology May thing.

[00:14:00]So, join in on mythology May.

[00:14:04]No, I'm just joking. But, yeah, having a good time with this. This was on my my original 10 hard books I want to read list.

[00:14:13]And after reading 50 pages, I can tell you this is not a hard book.

[00:14:19]Uh it's it's it's just long.

[00:14:22]I don't know why I thought it would be hard other than the length.

[00:14:26]Maybe because it was written in the 19th century, I don't know.

[00:14:31]Uh but, it's not hard. It's very easy to understand. I just one one thing that does annoy me, and I saw this in Samuel Butler's translation of the Odyssey.

[00:14:42]Like, you're talking about Greek myth or Greek Greek mythological figures, and you're using the Roman names. I guess that was a trend back then.

[00:14:52]It's like I If you're talking about the Greeks, why not use Like, they they say like Jove or Jupiter instead of Zeus, right? And so on, so on for all the other gods and heroes and such. I'm like, what? You're not talking about the Roman myth that was created like of these separate characters. Like, this is just the Greek stuff. So.

[00:15:13]That's what they That's That was their standard though. So, can't I'm not mad. Like, I know most of the Roman counterparts.

[00:15:21]But, at at one point I was confused about who uh uh I think the name was Latona.

[00:15:29]Gosh, it I don't know.

[00:15:34]Yeah, Latona The story was Latona and the Rustics.

[00:15:37]And I was like, "Who's Latona?" And then only at the end it said she was carrying um Artemis and or Diana and Apollo as twins. And I was like, "Oh, that's uh Leto or Leda, the Leda.

[00:15:55]The mother of Apollo and Artemis." And so, Gosh, why couldn't you just said that?

[00:16:02]But, uh Oh, well, that's just my minor gripe.

[00:16:06]Well, Finch's mythology, this will be an ongoing read, too. I think it's really important as a reader and a writer to know the foundational myths of the Western world. So, so many people today don't know anything about the the present day or the past.

[00:16:27]And I think I'm one of the I'm one of the believers in in a textuality and uh literature being a conversation with between all books. So, I think you can't really have a conversation if you don't have any conversation partners uh or teachers. So, myth.

[00:16:52]Okay, then.

[00:16:54]This I picked up at Goodwill. I have no idea about it, but peeling off the sticker now. This is Bushcraft a serious guide to survival and camping written by Richard Graves.

[00:17:13]You can survive in the wilderness with only a knife in this book.

[00:17:17]Illustrated with drawings and diagrams recommended in the last Whole Earth Catalog.

[00:17:22]Robinson Crusoe would have been delighted to find a copy of Bushcraft on his little island.

[00:17:28]From the Buffalo Courier Express.

[00:17:31]Uh It shows you how to stay alive in the woods, to find food and water, to build a shelter, to tell time, to make traps, maps, ropes.

[00:17:38]And I'm not a camper. I don't really camp at all, but I saw that and it brings up the age-old question of like would you survive a zombie apocalypse?

[00:17:50]Or any apocalypse. And every time I've thought about that in the past, I was like, "No, I would probably die immediately." Or if I did escape somewhere, I wouldn't know how to survive. I wouldn't I don't I have some gear that I could use, but I I wouldn't have it in a pinch and probably wouldn't know how to use it or survive, so even just like reading some of these entries, like there's a lot of Here's drawings of foods. Or Here, how do This is how you make a camp mattress with sticks.

[00:18:29]So for a mass market paperback for 99 cents, I was like, "Fine. I'll take this. Maybe I'll put it in my bag or something so I can read a page at a time or something. Just to learn some survival skills.

[00:18:45]Of course, it's it's easier to learn if you do it, if you practice it, so this is just theoretical knowledge in my noggin.

[00:18:54]But I thought it couldn't hurt to know a little bushcraft.

[00:19:00]Uh so that's the book I picked up.

[00:19:04]Interesting stuff.

[00:19:07]Yep, that's it. Thanks for watching. Let me know if what you're reading or don't.

[00:19:13]Uh if you have something that's good to share though, always happy to talk about it. So.

[00:19:19]Yep.

[00:19:20]Talk to you later.