Reading Time: 9.5 hours.
Rating: Just read it OMG/10.
Buy it: https://www.amazon.com/Educated-Memoir-Tara-Westover/dp/0399590501
The whole world is raving about Tara Westover’s words for good reason. She takes the clarity of her academic writing style and drenches it in the melancholy and dread of the southern (or midwestern) gothic; creating a confronting and fascinating picture of her brutal life experience. Even though this is a memoir and I’ve watched several interviews with this woman, at times I felt I was reading Carson McCullers’ fictional demented characters who are butchered by the broken dreams and splintered souls of their loved ones. I kept having to remind myself that this a real someone’s youth.
Westover was raised in the middle of nowhere by a survivalist family who were manically preparing for the end of the world. At the age of 16, having received no formal education, she taught herself enough to get into university where she moved her way up to Harvard to complete her PhD.
Educated is an important book that delves into the difficulty of balancing family obligation with the obligation you have to your self-development and hunger for truth. There is so much to learn from this riveting memoir, but if the world takes just one thing, I hope it treasures the idea that self-education, freedom, and space to live and think, is a zillion times more effective and humane than forcing children into rigid time frames and cold classrooms.
The book a week challenge is an effort to self-educate. For anyone undertaking the book a week challenge, I recommend this book as inspiration. It will quench the hunch that you can teach yourself anything you might want to know. It will remind you that if you dedicate time to feeding your mind it will grow into something greater than you could ever have imagined.
A Book A Week 