Yesterday we got the first two books we’re going to read, The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. It seems that the theme of our first unit is “we’re Puritans and also jerks.” I’m sure the books are very good, but I don’t know that much about them, besides the fact that they’re about people being horrible to each other effectively because of peer pressure.

We also started reading a short story today. It’s by the author of the The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. This story is different, it’s about making barely concealed allusions that one of the characters is actually Satan.