Back in my day when we went to college, we didn't get these fancy degrees in arts and letters. We got degrees in things like engineering and environmental sciences, which we subsequently never used because there was a recession on and we realized we had an aversion to working more than 3 hours a day unless it involved using our imagination, in which case we might consider 5.
But now that my chances of becoming an actual, sort of real author have gone from 0.0000005% to, I don't know, 0.1%, I feel like maybe I should start reading books again. In the last 4 months, my reading list has consisted of:
- The first three pages in a book on Buddhism that I've read 8 times
- The ingredients list of Nutella knock-offs in my epic search for palm oil-free delicious hazel nut spread
- A couple of short stories about life post-apocalypse.
But no more! It is time that I become educated like a real person with literary aspirations. Thus, I will take my janky $40 bike from Wal-Mart and ride to the Berkeley public library, where I will feast mine eyes on great writings of this century and the last. Or, you know, whatever the library has in.
This is the beginning of a series of posts on how to create your own education in literature. It's a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book, or a degree from Brown - figure it out as you go!
And here is the first part of the growing list of books that you, I, we, all of us really ought to read, at some point. Of course, I have to balance those with current stuff in my genre. I'll be going for these tomorrow:
Paradise Lost
The Iliad (I am not looking forward to this)
Something with a teenage girl and dragons/werewolves/vampires/unicorns/angels on the cover
No comments:
Post a Comment