Still managing, mostly, to hold onto my happiness from the weekend. It’s been snowing here since yesterday afternoon and is supposed to continue to snow until Tuesday afternoon leaving us with a total of ten inches. I know it could be worse, I could be in DC right now. The difference though is that we’ve had snow on the ground here since November and it will be hanging around until April. In spite of that I love Minnesota. Yeah, maybe I’m crazy.
Anywhoo, school this quarter is on its sixth of ten weeks. My how time flies. Things have settled down and my initial worries about being in a class of mostly computer engineers are all gone. It’s a really interesting class and the class discussions are the best I’ve had in any of my classes. There are 24 people in the class and regularly over 200 postings each week. There aren’t huge amounts of assigned reading, usually around 50 pages a week, so keeping up with the discussion isn’t that hard. The week’s readings aren’t post until Monday morning though which means my Monday and Tuesday nights are spent frantically reading and then making sense of the discussion questions. But it’s all good.
As for reading that is not school related, I finally finished reading The Tyranny of E-mail and will get a proper review up about it tomorrow. As a teaser, I had issues with the book.
I’m still chugging away through Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton biography and have some interesting Wharton / Proust tidbits to tell you about. It’s been an eye opener reading about Wharton within her historical milieu and realizing who else was writing at the same time (Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf just to name two). What a fertile period for literature. I wonder if in twenty years we will be able to look back at the early 2000s and say the same?
For my train commute/ work lunch break book I am reading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. It is not easy reading because of the slang and pidgin, but I am enjoying it and the pages are going by faster that I realized.
Last night I began reading Sophocles’ play Elektra. Hers is one of the largest female roles in all of Greek tragedy. I’m about halfway through and it is quite good.
I’ve been reading some Rumi poetry a poem or two at a time. Rumi is always a pleasure. His poems can frequently be read as religious and secular at the same time.
and in perusing the latest Bookforum I have discovered there is a new book on Emerson coming out called On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson by Branka Arsic. It doesn’t come out until April 1st just before my birthday. That hasn’t stopped me from suggesting to my Bookman that is sure would make a fine present.
Time to get to the reading for class this week. I know I’m behind on comments and I’ll try to catch up in the next day or two as school reading allows.
Crazy, to be sure. Today it is 80 degrees where I am and the low is about 6 times greater than your high. Don’t forget your surfboard.
It snowed here yesterday (not to settle, just to make everywhere bitterly cold and miserable) and I don’t know how you put up with it for so long. Although I’m sure expectations have a lot to do with it. I’m expecting snowdrops and crocuses and a few nicer days, so that’s probably what’s upsetting me! Ooh, and I just got Hermione Lee’s book Body Parts, which is a series of essays that join the life of the writer to their books. It has a chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Nose, for instance, which kind of sold it to me. I did want to read her (Lee, that is) but wasn’t sure I was in the mood for a huge biography. I’ll let you know how it goes!
I do wonder about what these decades will be like in retrospect from a literature point of view. I don’t read a lot of modern fiction right now but I’m curious to know which tings will stand out 100 years from now. I’d go read them if I knew that…
It really is interesting to put authors in their era and see the contemporaries. I really do love the sound of that biography. It just is so LONG.
Sounds like you’ve got lots of interesting reads on the go – always a good way to distract yourself from the winter weather! Sounds like school is going well too. I love those classes where you can get up good discussions – they’re all too rare!
I miss the snow! I loved Sea of Poppies. It was one of my favorites from last year, and I can’t wait for the second in the trilogy to come out. The vernacular got to me at first, too, but after awhile it wasn’t much of a problem. A good yarn, though.
I am always so in awe of how many things you are reading at once (I know most of them are school-related… but still)! And I thought I had my hands full with my three-book rule (I, for some reason, always have to have 3 books going at once).
Stay safe in the snow!
I had that realization while reading the Hermione Lee, too – it’s strange because Wharton seems, in many ways, like such an old-fashioned writer compared to the Modernists that were coming up in the last decades of her life.
I’ll be curious about your thoughts on Sea of Poppies!
I’m glad your class is going well. And I really must get that Wharton biography. I love reading about relationships among writers and literary milieus. I’d love to read the context stuff as much as the information about her life.
That’s so funny that you already have your birthday gift ideas lining up. I did the same thing when I got some newsletter recently that mentioned the third Stieg Larsson book is coming out on May 25 – my birthday. I quickly sent that to my husband and told him I found a perfect gift from him to me! haha… I do hope you’ll get your Emerson book so you can tell us about it!
I didn’t realize you guys got so much snow. I think we only got about half that amount and it’s now mostly cleaned up (from the streets and sidewalks anyway). We’ve had snow on the ground since November, too, and I Can’t Wait until I can see the lawn again. Glad to hear the semester is going smoothly–it’s zipping right along!