Living Latin

Living Latin is a bilingual English-Latin reader that brings Latin back to life through story, imagination, and thought.

In this collection of six parallel-text stories, Glenn P. Wood guides readers from accessible narrative Latin to richer, more classical prose. Each story appears in both English and Latin, allowing readers to follow the meaning while gradually becoming more comfortable with Latin vocabulary, structure, and style.

The book begins with approachable narrators such as a digital watch and a Roman drum, using familiar objects to explore time, atoms, rhythm, vibration, music, and the human heartbeat. It then moves into deeper reflections: a Roman library lamp considers knowledge, memory, censorship, and the survival of books, while a pugnacious thermometer becomes a sharp allegory about authority, medicine, expertise, and obsolescence.

The advanced stories enter darker historical and philosophical territory. In The Door Knockers, two ancient Roman door knockers witness how power, law, slavery, silence, and procedure shape human lives. In Constans - Forever Young, the survival of Latin itself becomes a meditation on faith, language, memory, and cultural inheritance.

This is not a conventional grammar drill or textbook. It is an invitation to experience Latin as a clear, compact, and intellectually powerful language.

With parallel English and Latin texts, thoughtful questions, and richly illustrated pages, Living Latin is ideal for Latin students, teachers, homeschoolers, language enthusiasts, and general readers interested in Roman history, classical education, rhetoric, law, medicine, science, and the lasting influence of Latin on modern English and Western thought.