This postMy master’s degree is an online program, which means no in-person classes other than occasional seminars (once a semester). And that means no constant reminders to do my homework. And that means it’s nowhere near the front of my mind.
Now, since this was giving me grief (namely that I haven’t remembered my homework until an hour before it was due, which doesn’t do anything to lower my stress level), I took an hour tonight to cull all the pertinent out of the syllabi for my two classes and distill it into a page on my personal wiki, with relevant calendar dates marked in Google Calendar. Out of the darkness and into the light. And now that I’ve finally started doing my reading, I’m finding that I really, really, really like it! It’s so up my alley it’s almost unbelievable. For example, this week’s module is on dictionaries. All the readings are about dictionaries and information-seeking behavior. So cool.
In other news, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged about what I’m reading. After a long period of separation, I’ve picked up A Tale of Two Cities again and I’m loving it. I also started reading Wide Sargasso Sea at a friend’s recommendation (it’s by Jean Rhys and is a prequel to Jane Eyre, telling the backstory of the madwoman in the attic). Definitely not what I expected, but I do like it. (I’m around 70 pages in.) I’m halfway through Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Sherwood Ring, and while I read the first half fairly quickly, it’s been a couple of weeks since I last picked it up. That’ll change soon. :) Those are the main books near the forefront; the rest are back burner, and there are a lot of them (Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy; L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea; John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody and Cart and Cwidder; Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book; George Maestri’s Digital Character Animation; and a few others).
As for the other library books on my shelf — the ones I haven’t yet gotten to — I’ve got a few books on piano playing, two histories of mathematics, As Long As I Have You (the fifth volume of Dean Hughes’ Children of the Promise series), some books on playwriting, some on Unicode, two programming-related books (one on Perl and one on Vim), three books on bookbinding, Dante’s Commedia in Italian, Grimm’s Kinder- Und Hausmärchen in German, and Book of Mormons in a handful of different languages (Tamil, Hindi, Amharic, and Mongolian, if you’re curious) for my BoM bibliography project. I also checked out Gerald Lund’s The Alliance yesterday. And today I checked out some histories of script deciphering (hieroglyphs, Etruscan, Linear A/B, that sort of thing) and Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, which I’ve never read but heard lots about, and which I thought was much longer than it really is. (I got a nice Clarendon edition, very beautiful to the eye.)
Heck, since this is quite a book post as it is, why don’t I go ahead and list some of the books I’m hoping to read soon. :) In general, my knowledge of the classics isn’t as extensive as I’d like, and I want to read Trollope, Proust, Thackeray, Hardy, and such, including people I know I probably won’t like very much like Hemingway. I also want to read the rest of the Jane Austen corpus (I’ve only read Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion). Ditto for L.M. Montgomery (I’ve read the first two Anne books). There’s a book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman which I started once and got a few chapters into, and which I loved, but I never finished it. I’ve also seen several copies of Good to Great lying around campus and want to check it out. The Arbinger Institute has put out a book called Leadership and Self-Deception which looks rather interesting. I’ve been meaning to read Freakonomics for a while. Back to fiction, Watership Down looks like it’ll be my type, and I’ve also been planning to read some John Buchan novels. Not to mention the massive Scottish novels George MacDonald wrote. I’ve heard The Phantom Tollbooth is really good, by the way. Oh, and I want to read Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling. And my roommate read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a while back and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since. Oh, and William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End. (I read The Wood Beyond the World years and years ago. William Morris, by the way, is an inspiration to me with all of his projects, particularly his printing work.) And there’s a children’s book called Snow Treasure which comes to me highly recommended.
Well, I could go on about books forever. I won’t, but since I can, I think I ought to blog about books more frequently. (After all, book posts are easier to write and I enjoy them very much. :)) Yes, libraries are definitely the place for me.
