These Are My Confessions

Well, my reading confessions at least. 

Yes, it is true.  I have spent several precious reading hours reading Harry Potter instead of all that "high" literature on my exam lists.  But really, what is a girl to do to escape boredom?  One must find entertainment during the summer where one can, especially since there's no good TV on and I live out in the middle of nowhere where there's not even a Target store for me to kill a restless hour here and there.  What makes this confession even more juicy?  Yes, I will be starting the fifth Harry Potter book in a few days, once I have had time to fully digest everything that happened in the (what is really well-described as "pivotal") fourth book.  Ah...Harry.  Where will your magical exploits lead you next?  And will there ever be a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor that sticks around for more than a year?  Inquiring minds need to know!

But still, even though I have had my head in a Harry Potter book for the last three days, I have also managed to check some stuff off my exam lists.  Here's my list of accomplishments since my last post:

A Room with a View - E. M. Forster

Endgame - Samuel Beckett

Introduction to A Shrinking Island - Jed Esty

Introduction to Victorian and Modern Poetics - Carol T. Christ

Introduction to Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle - Stephen Arata

"Ulysses, Myth, and Order" - T.S. Eliot

See?  I haven't been a total slacker, have I?  The Introductions are my way of having a feel for what the secondary/critical works are about and arguing that are on my exam lists as well as helping me gauge which ones I need to read more of.  For example, the Jed Esty book will be really helpful as I start to write my dissertation, I think, and I will plan to read more of that book as time permits over the summer.  The Christ book will be good for giving a good overview of the aesthetics of Modernist poets, specifically Yeats and Eliot and Pound.  The Arata book...well, I'm not quite sure how I'll use that one.  It is about degeneration and he looks at several writers that I'm interested in and at books that are on my looks--Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, She, some works by Rudyard Kipling, etc.  

AND Forster's A Room with a View is one of my new favorite books.  I absolutely loved that book.  The problem is that my advisor asked me today why I liked it so much and I couldn't really give a coherent answer, so I'll have to work on that. 

Lastly, while I have decided I am a Forster fan, I have also decided that I'm not a Beckett fan. What was with him anyway?  I don't think he would have written such crazy rubbish if he'd lived in Ireland instead of Paris.