2016 Read Harder Challenge Begins

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the Bookriot Read Harder Challenge. In essence, it is a reading list put together by Bookriot to point one toward some 2016 reading goals.''

Read more about the challenge on the Bookriot website

I have tasked myself with this challenge for 2016. I already got an easy one out of the way: read a book adapted from a movie. While in bed with a lovely cold last week, I finished up reading The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel. It being what I like to call a disguised non-fiction book, it was fairly readable. I have a huge fascination with art theft and forgery, so naturally the topic drew me in. It is quite lengthy, but I stuck with it and muscled through. I just had to find out where the Nazi's were hiding it all in the end, and I didn't want to find out from Wikipedia.

But I digress, the challenge states that one must also watch the movie and then debate which is better. So I did just that. The Monuments Men movie adaptation with George Clooney, Matt Damon, and others was enjoyable. It was a fictionalized version of the book, as they changed the names of the soldiers and other characters (except Hitler of course), but the story flowed similarly to the book. It was of course shorter and left out lots of detail the book gave, but what movie adaptation doesn't. I thought Clooney et al captured the essence of The Monuments Men story. 

After watching the film, I did some further sleuthing online concerning still lost pieces of art that were looted by the Nazi's. Needless to say, the Nazi's were terrible people. There are priceless works of art that have not been recovered after WWII. Check out the official Monuments Men Foundation website, which aims to continue the search for lost art. The "Discoveries" section is particularly cool, as it highlights stories of art been recovered as recently as May 2015. The movie brought awareness to the general public of these missing art pieces, and it has also helped recover some lost pieces back to their rightful owners. Amazing stuff!

Reactions to Horse Show Dad at George Morris Clinics

Chronicle of the Horse (COTH) blogger Horse Show Dad posted today about his experience at George Morris Clinics.

Read the full text of the COTH article here

Love him or hate him, equestrians recognize the pure talent George Morris has with horses. I too have had the opportunity to audit a George Morris clinic a few years back. Although George Morris can be a bit rough around the edges, I think the best advice or lesson he teaches is humility. Every horse is different, and every horse has to be ridden differently.

When I was first riding in equitation classes regularly, more focus was being put on my position rather than on my riding skills. As the Horse Show Dad quotes George Morris saying "the basics are simple, but they're hard to acquire, this sport comes very slow." No truer words have been spoken about riding. Though I have been riding for nearly all my life, and been taking riding lessons for approximately fifteen years, I feel like some of the basics didn't click till about year seven. I of course knew diagonals and leads by that time, but I couldn't frame a horse or get one moving off of its hind end until I was in my late twenties.

George Says the Darndest Things

To ride in the equitation rings, you not only have to have beautiful position, you also have to be able to ride any horse well. That's why one of the tests in the equitation judging is switching horses with another rider! There are plenty of lesson horses out there who will allow us as riders to flop around on them around the ring, and those horses are important teachers in the beginning, but at some point we have to acknowledge that an easy horse does not a great rider make. To me it is the difficult horses, the horses that challenge us to think, that make us better riders.  

And this is why George Morris yells, insults, and berates all the riders in his clinics. He is not there to pat the rider on the back, he is there to challenge the rider to be a better horseman.