Summer again...that means blogging!
Hi everyone!
The coming of summer vacation always seems to trigger some kind of impulse to blog in me. Maybe I'm just bored, or I need to prove to myself that I'm doing something useful and important, instead of just...well, my job, but you know what I mean. Anyway, it's summer, and I'm back!
I was thinking today - well, just now, really, as I was washing dishes and putting baking supplies into airtight containers, and freaking out about enormous bugs bashing themselves against window screens, and making a fresh cup of tea - that I should keep a sort of reading journal this summer. Not exactly like last summer, which was sort of a race to read as many novels as possible. I do want to read more novels, and actually have already, but I want to broaden out the Summer Project to include non-fiction, and short stories, and poems, and...I don't know, plays (I actually own a copy of Waiting For Godot that I have never read. Maybe that will go on the list). The impetus is, partially, this: some of the music students in the Jazz program at X are Strongly Encouraged to keep a listening journal, of the CDs and artists that they listen to. I doubt that these journals are marked in any kind of qualitative manner; listening to slightly sub-par music and musicians could be almost as instructive as Mingus and Rollins, I suppose. The point was more to a) make sure that these students were actually listening to music (that wasn't assigned to them), and b) (this one is pure speculation, but it sounds plausible, don't you think?) to prove that some amount of actual thought went into the listening experience, that some processing of the style, and choices, and aesthetics, and artistry, was at least attempted. So that's the project. I want to read more books off of the List, obviously, but I also want to go back through my big anthology from last year, and read some of the poetry that we glided over, and read past 1899, which is basically where we stopped, though the anthology didn't. And I want to read American literature (the survey was English-English, as in the country, not the language), and maybe some Canadian literature (the hesitation, amusingly, comes entirely from the fact that I dislike the organization, or lack thereof, of the section of CanLit in the library. It apparently has been expanded rapidly in the last few years, with mostly thin little paperback books, crammed tightly together on the shelves, which makes it look amateurish and unedited. The whole section. It's terrible).
I'm planning on reading about the disciplines I'm studying as well - I want to get a head start on Contemporary Philosophy, especially, seeing as I studied Medieval this year, and am going to be skipping over roughly five hundred years to get to 1850, where my probable next courses pick up. Which is quite a bit, really. I also want to get a jump on Literary Theory - I think exploring it on my own will help me avoid that out-of-my-depth feeling about certain courses that I found this year. So yeah. Modest goals, dontcha think? Hah. I wish. Anyway, I'll end to day with a brief recap of what I've read so far this summer - not actually as much as I'd like, for a full month after exams ended and I moved, but hey, I've been busy. Also, sometimes an afternoon marathon of Hoarders or What Not To Wear on A&E/TLC, combined with mindless surfing of various blogs (Cake Wrecks! Regretsy! My Life is Average!), is much more appealing than trying to unpack Faulkner. Sorry, The Sound and the Fury...I did finish you, it just took me a while.
Okay. The list so far:
Summer readers of the world: Onwards and upwards!
The coming of summer vacation always seems to trigger some kind of impulse to blog in me. Maybe I'm just bored, or I need to prove to myself that I'm doing something useful and important, instead of just...well, my job, but you know what I mean. Anyway, it's summer, and I'm back!
I was thinking today - well, just now, really, as I was washing dishes and putting baking supplies into airtight containers, and freaking out about enormous bugs bashing themselves against window screens, and making a fresh cup of tea - that I should keep a sort of reading journal this summer. Not exactly like last summer, which was sort of a race to read as many novels as possible. I do want to read more novels, and actually have already, but I want to broaden out the Summer Project to include non-fiction, and short stories, and poems, and...I don't know, plays (I actually own a copy of Waiting For Godot that I have never read. Maybe that will go on the list). The impetus is, partially, this: some of the music students in the Jazz program at X are Strongly Encouraged to keep a listening journal, of the CDs and artists that they listen to. I doubt that these journals are marked in any kind of qualitative manner; listening to slightly sub-par music and musicians could be almost as instructive as Mingus and Rollins, I suppose. The point was more to a) make sure that these students were actually listening to music (that wasn't assigned to them), and b) (this one is pure speculation, but it sounds plausible, don't you think?) to prove that some amount of actual thought went into the listening experience, that some processing of the style, and choices, and aesthetics, and artistry, was at least attempted. So that's the project. I want to read more books off of the List, obviously, but I also want to go back through my big anthology from last year, and read some of the poetry that we glided over, and read past 1899, which is basically where we stopped, though the anthology didn't. And I want to read American literature (the survey was English-English, as in the country, not the language), and maybe some Canadian literature (the hesitation, amusingly, comes entirely from the fact that I dislike the organization, or lack thereof, of the section of CanLit in the library. It apparently has been expanded rapidly in the last few years, with mostly thin little paperback books, crammed tightly together on the shelves, which makes it look amateurish and unedited. The whole section. It's terrible).
I'm planning on reading about the disciplines I'm studying as well - I want to get a head start on Contemporary Philosophy, especially, seeing as I studied Medieval this year, and am going to be skipping over roughly five hundred years to get to 1850, where my probable next courses pick up. Which is quite a bit, really. I also want to get a jump on Literary Theory - I think exploring it on my own will help me avoid that out-of-my-depth feeling about certain courses that I found this year. So yeah. Modest goals, dontcha think? Hah. I wish. Anyway, I'll end to day with a brief recap of what I've read so far this summer - not actually as much as I'd like, for a full month after exams ended and I moved, but hey, I've been busy. Also, sometimes an afternoon marathon of Hoarders or What Not To Wear on A&E/TLC, combined with mindless surfing of various blogs (Cake Wrecks! Regretsy! My Life is Average!), is much more appealing than trying to unpack Faulkner. Sorry, The Sound and the Fury...I did finish you, it just took me a while.
Okay. The list so far:
- Howard's End, by E.M. Forster. Highly enjoyable, lightish read, especially compared to the next couple of novels I tried. Sort of like Sense and Sensibility, in the pair of sisters that give the story structure, but moved forward a hundred years or so, and very explicitly entering into a debate regarding capitalism vs social idealism that apparently was going around at the time.
- The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene. Greene was a very prolific English novelist from the Interwar period through to, oh, I don't know when. When he died, I suppose. Last year I read The End of the Affair, which I may have to go back to now that I'm aware of the crazy importance Catholic symbolism has in his 'important' novels, which include P&G and AE. P&G is, unlike most of Greene's work, set entirely in Mexico, during a period of left-wing power, and violent suppression of the Catholic Church, at least in some states. The main character is a 'whisky priest,' who has fathered a child and is thus in a state of mortal sin, but nevertheless can, in his office as a priest, absolve others of sins, and 'place God in their mouths' with the Eucharist. Very interesting ideas about the separation between the person and the role as spiritual leader.
- The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. Tough to read. Not in a thematic way, but punctuationally (totally a word). Faulkner plays with narrative point of view, and clearly differentiates his characters through the way they think while they're telling their parts of the story. Plays with timeline, isn't big on clarity, and opens the novel with the most difficult chunk to follow: the mixed and jumbled experiences and memories of the 'idiot brother', who doesn't talk, and whose memories of different events, years apart, simply flow into each other with barely any contextualizing details, so until you figure out what's going on, he seems to have multiple main caregivers, a sister who is at once seven and thirteen and an absent adult, and brothers who are likewise both children and adults, present and missing. Blarg! The last section is a third-person narrative, focussed on a family servant who watches the whole family saga, trying to hold things together. It's so detached and calmly descriptive that it almost doesn't fit with the other sections, but is a heck of a lot easier to read. Anyway. Worth reading, I guess. I'll probably go back to it at some point just to try again.
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by God-knows-who. I was loaned this one by somebody at work. Breezy epistolary, set in postwar Channel Islands and England, with some serious this-is-what-war-was-like-here bits and then a predictable happy and romantic ending. Pleasant, but almost too easy, too obvious, especially compared with the above.
- About 150 pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is a huge but reasonable accessible non-fiction historical study of the geological and geographical influences that caused people in Eurasia to develop the titular technologies (germs sort of fit in there somewhere) that allowed them to dominate the peoples of other continents so thoroughly once they began to clash. It mostly has to do with large, domesticatable but not too easy to kill animals, and population-density- and local-ecosystem-related pressures to begin cultivating food instead of remaining at a hunter-gatherer stage. Interesting, certainly, but somehow I feel like the first couple of chapters gave away the whole argument (yes, introductory material is supposed to do exactly this), and I'm not sure I'll be particularly interested in his expanding (expounding?) upon his points. But it won a Pulitzer. We'll see.
- 2/3 of the stories in Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman. They are mostly predictably Gaiman-esque, which is to say based in existing literature (fairy tales, legends, HP Lovecraft mythology), but twisted and turned and with more references to penises than I'm convinced are entirely necessary. Simple in language but not ideas, and requiring more post-reading contemplation than I want to give them before rushing through to the next story.
Summer readers of the world: Onwards and upwards!