Maybe I'm only so interested because I like writing?
Continuing List of Books Read in 2009:
1. Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale (Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook)
2. Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Traitor (Matthew Stover) (reread)
3. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Frederick Douglass)
4. Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor (Matthew Stover)
5. White Night (Jim Butcher)
6. Un Lun Dun (China Miéville)
7. Daisy Miller (Henry James)
8. The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss)
9. Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) (reread)
10. Heroes of the Valley (Jonathan Stroud)
11. Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson)
12. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson)
13. Feast of Souls (C.S. Friedman)
14. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
15. A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
16. Divine Grandeur (Lucas York)
17. The Seven Towers (Patricia C. Wrede)
18. The Briar King (Greg Keyes)
19. Empowered (Vol. 1) (Adam Warren)
20. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
21. The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston)
22. Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne (David Gaider)
23. Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
24. Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (Tony Kushner)
25. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
26. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika (Tony Kushner)
The Road was okay. Pretty much nothing happens, which is an odd thing to say because a whole lot happens. It's just written as if nothing happens. That's all I'll say about that because I'm writing my response paper on it and I don't want to use up my ideas. Heh. More importantly, there were a few times near the end where I caught myself thinking, "You know, I should really be caring about this." In other words, if I had become emotionally invested in the characters, I would have been worried or sad or what have you. But... I wasn't. Even at the very end, I was at most patronizingly sad--like, "Aww. Poor you." And to be honest I'm not sure if that's a failure on McCarthy's part or a really great success--was he trying to make me care about these people, or did he intend to make everything so even that even the end seems mundane? Hmm hmm. The fact that I'm even thinking about this puts the book above the vast majority of everthing else we've read this semester.
I have no real strong opinion about Angels in America. Well, that's not quite true, but I don't feel like getting into it.
...And that's it. I am done with the reading for American Lit. I have my last response paper to write, and a final exam, but otherwise I can check this class off my list. Metaphorically speaking.
Greek is rather similar. We're basically just cruising along, waiting for the end of the semester. Each class we read a little further in Matthew (as in the gospel) but there are no more, like, assignments. No exercises. No grammar to drill or vocabulary to memorize. There's just reading Matthew. And the professor is amenable to a party instead of class on the last day--though she said specifically that she wasn't going to plan it. It's her last class ever, you see. She's retiring after this year. Greek meets on the last day of classes of the semester, and is her second of two classes that day. So yeah.
That also means my last class of the semester may be a party instead of reading Matthew. Sorry, Matthew, but I won't be terribly disappointed.
On Tuesday OBOC got together and watched the DVD of the fall '05 show, because that's the current seniors' first semester. Not all of the seniors joined in their first semester, of course, but a bunch did, and it was amusing to see them so young. When I'm a graduating senior... well, assuming any sort of DVD-viewing thing happens, which I hope it will, but showing the equivalent--the fall '08--won't be terribly exciting for future!OBOC. Because of the people who will graduate in spring 2012... only two people were in the fall '08 show. So unless one of the current sophomores stays a fifth year (which is always possible) it'll only be of limited interest... well, whatever. I probably shouldn't be thinking about such things so many years beforehand.
For milton... I have a, like, 12-page paper to write. Yeah, not so much with the done. Nor logic... we have to fit a few weeks or so into the week we have left. Good job!
But otherwise... the semester is really almost over. It's kind of scary. I'm not used to this! School is supposed to go on until June!
...
Wait... no, I'm sorry. I don't want it to go that long. I'll shut up now.
So in my last entry I talked about tvtropes a bunch, and I operated on the assumption that you had any idea what I was talking about. Actually, more than that--I assumed you knew well what I was talking about. As I'm sure at least someone doesn't, I will explain.
Tvtropes is tvtropes.org, and honestly you could just go explore and see what it's all about, but what's the point of forcing you to spend hours? At its most basic it is a catalogue of common techniques writers use when telling stories. To quote the front page: "Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means 'stereotyped and trite'. In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them."
For example! The organization of a main cast of a TV show into a "dysfunctional family" is a trope. A rule-abiding character's backstory being slightly less rule-abiding is a trope. The random baseball episode is a trope. The creation/existence of an evil twin is a trope. Characters going on a game show is a trope. Having characters celebrate holidays that look just like real holidays but with different names is a trope.
...Are you getting it? Tropes can be either really specific (like something one character does once) or really general (like a story's fourth-dimensional setting) or both (like something specific that nevertheless spans a work). There are a ton of them and tvtropes attempts to list them all.
But it has more than just pages of story conventions. It has pages for works themselves, which list many of the tropes used by that work. Because you can go from trope to work, from work to other trope, just those two kinds of pages can waste countless of yours hours if you let yourself get carried away. Trust me. I know. There are also pages on creators, from which you can usually get to works, which just gets that cycle going.
There's a ton more, but rather than prattle on about it, I present to you what is probably my favorite page on the whole thing: Trope Name Injokes.
I may (or may not, I dunno) reference tvtropes more freely in the future. Or perhaps I may use some trope vocabulary because, honestly, they make it a lot easier to talk about things... it actually makes it both easier and harder to discuss things--harder because I have to avoid saying, like, "[Character] is totally a yandere", easier because I can just think that and move on directly to explaining what that means as if it were my original thought. Which is good, in a way, because I'm not sure how to even pronounce "yandere."
...I could go on talking about tvtropes, but really it's better if you experience them for yourself. So you know when I said "what's the point of forcing you to spend hours"? The point is that 1) tvtropes is awesome, 2) there's a lot there for you to discover if you look around, 3) I'm hungry and I'm going to go eat breakfast.
To close, here's something completely unrelated:
Click to view