"about me
Immodestly bookish.
Lover of lists.
Imperfect bibliophile.
Devotee of late Victorian literature.
Extreme grammar nazi.
Obsessive writer.
Utterly enamored with witty epigrams."
"I've never been one for poetry, though I am an English major"
"Books are sacred. Books gain personality. Nothing feels better than opening a worn-out old favorite. I love the smell of a new book, fresh off the Barnes and Noble shelves."
"I am an English major, but unable to finish most classics in a couple days.
Maybe because I don't read hugely long books very quickly.
Also, I read faster when something is very interesting.
Not a whole lot of that, to me, in classics.
Modern books, heck yeah."
"Oh, believe me, I spent almost two months reading Dracula! I am not a fast reader when it comes to classics.
Hand me a Dan Brown book though and I’ll devour that sucker in two days. :oD"
"Ugg ... this book became a running joke for the English majors in my college because we all hated it so much. 'Well, it wasn't as bad as Billy Budd' was still a terrible review."
"NERD ESSAYS! :o)
This semester, I’m doing two finals on Doctor Who related topics. For my 'math class' (the quotation marks are necessary because it's essentially 'math for English majors' with very few numbers involved) we're doing a project on time travel (with plenty of pop culture references!) and in my journalism class I’m going to be writing my final article on Whovian culture, specifically at Anime Boston…where I will be going this weekend…*is a nerd*."
"I wrote a 5 page essay about Milton and punk as well. I connected Satan's soliloquy about the mind ('...can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, what matter where if I be the same') with current conceptions of hell and autonomy in punk rock using the songs 'Hellnation' by Dead Kennedys and 'Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell' by Mischief Brew. Prof said it was my best paper all year."
"I love English syllabuses. I practically collect them. I like to analyze them and think about what the theme of that class is going to be. I like to critique their choices, I like to collect new titles for my reading list. I am obsessed with my brother-in-law’s high school English reading lists, and I think it creeps him out a bit. I love it when bookstores put out local school summer reading lists. For me, those are equivalent to Fall Fashion Week for a fashionista, or the Sunday Wall Street Journal for a stock-aholic. This all stems from my obsession with all things I read in high school. This is discussed in a soon-to-be classic scene from the recent film 'Easy A'. Basically the angst of our reading material seems to mimic that time of our life. I even had a friend who practically became half the characters we read about. I had to stop him at Gatsby, because that bordered on sacrilege for me."
"My Mexican Literature professor always brings old books from his parents library, one day we realized all of us were smelling them when he passed them along."
"I don't understand why they can't have classes on good books, like Watchmen"
"I'll read the back of shampoo bottle if nothing else is available, my brain tries to devour everything & contemplate it all at its liesure. I call it thinking, others call it woolgathering."
"Am I seriously the only English major who hates The Great Gatsby?
...
I thought The Great Gatsby was rather trite. I read it in high school like I was supposed to and I didn't learn anything new... it should be pretty obvious to most people that a married woman with a child is not going to leave her husband for some guy she probably met in high school who appears to be stalking her. Apparently it wasn't obvious to Gatsby, though?
...
That's just my opinion. I'll take Camus any day over Fitzgerald, so maybe I should just move to France where The Stranger is their sacred cow."
"I went through the whole history of Western literature (not exhaustively, but trying to get a representative sample) looking for the patterns and what the purpose of these stories was. Then I studies screenplays and movies, watching some 200 films, outlining many of them, getting the screenplays, reading them, and so on. All this time I was looking for why these artforms existed—and what their utility was.
But after about two years of this, I started to doubt whether I really believed in the story. I mean, there are people—I think they are likely to be religious—who really think a novel, say, says something really important and useful. Says something profound. Helps them get through life. Changes them. But what I discovered was that I’m not one of those people. Novels and stories and movies are mere entertainment. Sophocles is no better that Steven Segal. It’s just bread and circuses.
At bottom, a novel is an anecdote. And it’s all made up. It’s fiction. It’s a fantasy. This really comes how when you write one (or 4, as I have). You just—make shit up. It’s imagination, pure an simple."
"I'm not sure you're meant to understand what's going on; I'm not even sure Carroll knows himself. If I would have read this as a kid I would have been even more confused, so I've never really understood why this is considered such a classic children's book. It has the fantastical lands and characters of children's stories, but the subject matter seems to be something that few people will ever hope to grasp - let alone a child. This is coming from a guy with a BA(Hons) in English and History, although analysing the meanings behind novels was never my strong point. Half of the time I'm not even sure the 'meanings' some of my lecturers pulled out from the text were ever intended by the author."
"I don't think I've ever thought about what century a book is from before."
"Ugh. I really, really don't want to have to take an entire class on this in graduate school but it looks like it's going to happen. I don't like this, I never have and I probably never will. I don't think it's funny, and I hate the translations, and I found the stories boring. I understand that he was incorporating all these different types into one -- bawdy, fabliau, etc. -- but I still find it terribly boring and poorly written.
Writing is an art and a craft that took time to develop, much longer than many of the others. I don't want to look at the rudimentary forms of this art or the base of it, I want to look at what it has become, how a person today can communicate an idea or a concept using words in an elaborate, mysterious way. This is just... archaic and uninteresting to me. There's a reason I'm not a history major."
HE IS TALKING ABOUT CHAUCER
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