April novel-readings are causally unrelated to May school schedules

[garran]

Today I told somebody I had a livejournal, and then I felt slightly guilty for the usual reasons. Here's what I've been reading, at least.

Emma Bull, Bone Dance
Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke (reread)
Liz Williams, Banner of Souls
Maureen Johnson, The Bermudez Triangle
Charles Stross, Glasshouse

I'd thought that I was going to have at least a two week break between the end of my spring courses and the advent of the summer, but that is an example of a time that I was wrong, and so today, the Monday after the Monday after the Friday I took my last final, I was already back. Do you want to hear about the courses I am taking? Internet, I will tell you.

On Mondays and Wednesdays from six until nine o'clock I'm taking WMST 224C: Women in Literature, so that was what I was at today. The professor has tattoos on her arms, and a demeanor that is slightly nervous but sensible, and a British accent -- not BBC received English, but some regional variant such that that rather than simply getting rid of the 'r's she leaves out of words like 'are' and 'certain' she recycles them to the end of other words like 'idea'. I am pretty excited about my sense of her and of the general atmosphere of the course. (That I've already had two separate nerdy and stimulating conversations with various of my classmates also seems to bode pretty well.)

Unlike my last summer's literature course, this one probably won't be reflected in my novel-reading entries, since the syllabus seems to comprise entirely short stories. But we are reading selections from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (which I've heard of), Nancy Lee's Dead Girls (which I haven't), and an anthology and a reading packet neither of which have morbidly evocative names. There will apparently be at least one session where we watch and talk about scenes from Buffy, for which I feel a little overqualified.

Secondly, I'm in PHIL 435: Environmental Ethics on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 'til 4. This was the philosophy course I haven't taken that fit in with my schedule (the other candidates were in the second summer term, and might have had finals that conflicted with IDEC), and so the fact that this is such an activist summer is pretty coincidental. I don't know much about how it will go yet; I've actually been hanging on to the possibility of dropping it, in case the two intensive summer courses are too much for me, but having learned that the women's studies course extends into July, and not merely to mid-June like I thought, I feel cautiously hopeful that that won't be necessary.

(And I'm working 16 hours a week as before, Monday and Wednesdays before school and Friday afternoons.)

P.S. to cola: I got three A minuses and an A+ last term, so I guess you "already got" those "books", too!

Comments

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

Where are you working? I didn't know that you were! Or I've forgotten. >_>;

[garran.livejournal.com]

At a clothing store warehouse (which is actually just the basement). As jobs go, it's pretty nondescript.


-Garran

[http://users.livejournal.com/_quinn/]

... says the large gray square. :)

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

He knows what he's talking about.

Artist's rendering:

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

A Garran at home in its natural habitat? Very well camouflaged! The polar bear in the blizzard would be jealous.

[masamage.livejournal.com]

I don't think he ever blogged it.

(ALSO ANDY: the "overqualified" thing in the entry made me giggle.)

[garran.livejournal.com]

False!

(I feel way less melodramatically weirded out about the job now than I did then; I am kind of in a groove. Also, he switched radio stations, although it really wasn't much of an improvement.)


-Andy H.

[masamage.livejournal.com]

Oh, right. Fine, then!

What did he switch to?

[garran.livejournal.com]

The local insipid talk radio station. It has a longer attention span than the traffic station, and obviously covers a wider range of topics, but it tends to indeed be pretty insipid.


-Andy

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

So you did! And I missed it. I am a horrible friend.

In other news, I'm going to have to nose at Kelly Link's stories some (Once I finish Little Women. ^_^; ). She sounds fascinating! Though challenging, and I am perhaps ill-equipped to read. The Canton Library has a couple of anthologies that she co-edited, with a story of hers each, but no proper collections of her own work. Ooh, but the Plymouth Library has the Magic For Beginners collection! Shiny.

[garran.livejournal.com]

You can also freely download her first collection 'Stranger Things Happen', if you're better than I am at getting around to reading things on your computer. I will be interested to hear what you think!

I've never yet got around to Little Women. Do you think I should?


-Garran

[meta4mix.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying Little Women. Sometimes it will expound cloyingly on the sweetness and virtue of the principles, as though trying to coat the book with the sheen of lives lived to a moral perfection that is not actually possible. But if you read past these annoying parts, it's a very enjoyable slice-of-life sort of tale. I'm a little more than halfway through, and eventually the story has stopped trying so hard to believe that it is perfect, and started to show some cracks. (The narrator, however, seems undaunted, and will still carry on at length from time to time. Her effervescence is actually sort of impressive.)

Anyway, I am enjoying the book. The characters seem realistic, and drive the story well. Trying to figure out capricious Jo has been fun; sometimes she's a giddy, runabout tomboy, and others a prickly, wildly strait-laced old woman. ;^>

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

Today I told somebody I had a livejournal, and then I felt slightly guilty for the usual reasons.
Err ... why guilty feelings?

[garran.livejournal.com]

On account of I don't actually update it very often, at least by the standards I have historically expected from myself.


-Garran

[vegetius.livejournal.com]

Okay, thanks. By the same token, aren't you busy than you once were? It seems like an understandable lapse. Of course, the head does not rule the heart.