So its either genetic or family cultural inheritance?
Either way I missed out.
You’re not missing much, Neville! What’s odd is that most of those named (and I left out my wife’s sister, my daughter’s aunt) are grammarians. Word order. Sentence structure. Parts of speech. Infinitives, clauses, phrases, whatever the hell subjunctive mood is… I never understood that stuff, or, perhaps a better way to say it is that I never cared for that stuff. I like and appreciate well constructed sentences, good vocabulary and complex thoughts and story telling. As to arguing over whether or not the word ending in “ly” is really an adverb or a tricky adjective is not to my liking. I missed out on that part, too. I was the “focus on literature and writing” member of the family.
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You will learn to appreciate grammer only when you study another language. English grammer means nil to English speaking people, until they try to translate , say between English and German. Then the grammer rules are useful and meaningful.
Literature and writing are linked, of course. You learn to write well by reading… just like you learn to program by studying other peoples programs. Learning the syntax will never teach you to program.
I hated literature at school… I think the teaching methods were poor, but I learned to like it later in life.
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I couldn’t agree more. I read voraciously as a child. I also agree with the bit about foreign language, and I would say that I have had grammar courses and I have a better understanding than most – and I do know that one should say, “If it were me…” rather than “If it was me…” which is back to that subjunctive mood wisecrack I made earlier. I just don’t spend a lot of time studying parts of speech and grammar itself. My interest lies in the craft of writing and story telling over examining parts of speech in a clinical way. That might explain why even my exposure to and study of French was never a blazing success. I can read it a little, but speaking it and understanding it as it is spoken is not a skill I possess.
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Read Dorothy Sayers “Mind of the Maker”
It is about creativity
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I remember arriving at a new school in a new city (Melbourne, coming from Perth), in a new state, for Year 9, and the curriculum for that year included two books I’d read the year before, for pleasure! John Wyndham’s “The Chrysalids” and Richard Adams’ “Watership Down”.
Then the following year (which I ended up flunking, mostly due to truancy) we got To Kill A Mockingbird, which I loved and still love and some other interesting “contemporary” stuff (A Kind of Loving and “The Pigman”)…
Two years later, we’d moved BACK to Perth and I was attempting Yr 11 and picked English literature as one subject, and Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” was on the curriculum and I LOATHED it so much, I couldn’t get past the first chapter - I just couldn’t force myself to read it - every single paragraph my mind would be elsewhere by the second sentence… Anyway - I knew I was going to flunk again and spoke to my parents about leaving school, but both insisted I stay - my mum got me moved to a more “vocational” stream at the same school (and extra art time)… I still haven’t been able to read any of those English writers like the Bronte sisters or Jane Austen. I love “literature”… I love ALL the great Russians, mostly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, but also Gorky, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Pasternak and Sholokhov (Quiet Flows The Don is in my top 10 favourite novels of all time)… Many of the Nobel laureate winners from the 20th century too (includes Pasternak, but also magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Gunther Grass)… But not those 19th century women from England… No plans to amend that either 
- and it’s not a gender thing either - some of my favourite writers are women, like the LATE GREAT Ursula K. Le Guin, and Harper Lee! And I only just recently discovered the amazing work of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (not a woman)- “1Q84” is just amazing! Does foreign literature translated to English still count?
My youngest daughter did a double major, Japanese and Media Studies…
I’m going to add a link to an advertisement I see all the time:
Their boxes all come with Win11 installed, but the least expensive still look like a fine ‘spare’ computer for Linux experimenting. And much less expensive than some of the other minis I’ve seen.
I’m still using my Gigabyte Brix Celeron mini-PC…
- Dual Core
- 16 GB LPDDR 3
- 512 GB SSD
running Red Hat 8 (RHEL) - mostly headless - but Gnome 3 is installed, I just keep a monitor hooked up to it… Ideally I’d like an AMD mini-PC…
But ARM are slowly playing catchup with Intel and AMD… Been tempted by the Khadas Edge 2 for a while now - still umming and arring :
Got (allegedly - 'cause it was promised for December, but I reckon I’ll be lucky to see it in April) this thing from AURGA coming : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aurgaviewer/aurga-viewer-5-in-1-5ghz-video-streaming-transmitter?ja=z2aimakj
I’ll probably run a bunch of stuff “headless” and just hook that up when I need the console…
Two of my absolute favorites. I grew up in the Deep South, USA. In this case, Mississippi. And if you know Mississippi, it was actually the Delta, and the lower Delta at that, one of the poorest places in the US (my county is ranked 28th poorest in the nation by median household income; my grandmother’s home, where my dad grew up in the county next door is fourth poorest in the nation using this metric). My mom and dad were educators, but everybody was poor back then and they were grossly underpaid until at least my high school years. Reading and sports were the cheapest things we could do to pass time, and eventually the sun goes down, closing down sports). Those books really spoke to me on a number of levels.
Joseph Conrad is another Russian author I like and I read Love in a Time of Cholera, but I never read anything else by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Also love The Left Hand of Darkness, an amazing sci-fi novel. Albert Camus’s, L’Etranger, led me to minor in philosophy (though I ended up with an actual minor in communications). As a 20 year old, I found nihilism fascinating. Not so much in my 50s. I also was HEAVILY influenced by George Orwell. 1984 and Animal Farm (along with my Cold War upbringing) profoundly affected my view of the world; there was also that Watership Down thing.
Thanks for sharing that, Daniel. Love your list and I appreciate the opportunity to stroll down memory lane through my favorite books. Will check out a few recs of yours, too. I can’t tolerate not knowing something about a few authors you mention (Read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, but not Gorky or Bulgakov and I only have a passing knowledge of Pasternak).
Ok, enough literature geeking out. Will get back to FOSS geeking out now. 
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