What have I enjoyed about this summer, did you ask?
It's the first summer in nearly two years that I have had the chance to read for reading's sake.
First, Oh My God, Oh My God, why did I ever stop doing this?
"What!" I hear you protesting, "But you're a humanities, grad. And one working in cultural studies and literature at that. How the fuck could you pull that off without reading?"
And so, I hasten to explain. I *do* read for school.
Thanks to coursework, more than I like, sometimes.
Specifically, what I don't like is that I have to cram so much reading into a regular semester that I, (like several of my fellow grad students), have devised a way of reading for processing *ahem* key information.
Thanks to the sheer amount of reading assigned, and to the horrible insecurity-generating environment of grad school, reading in / for a grad classroom, is so often transformed into some warped version of Toddlers and Tiaras. This has, of course, transformed my reading pattern for the worse.
Summer provides the only respite - since I usually can't afford to take classes over the semester.
But I've spent the last two summers (my only free time), working on classes and writing a thesis. This summer, however, I'm reading for reading and that's a huge relief.
Over the last two weeks I've read (among other things), for the first time, "The Chronicles of Chrestomanci", Volumes I and II, by Diana Wynne Jones. Although the name had been on the periphery of my reading for a while then, I only picked up Diana Wynne Jones after she died last year (read Neil Gaiman's very personal post about saying bye to DWJ). Nearly everything I'm thinking about her work has been said before.
Her craft is incredible. Farah Mendlesohn points out in this wonderfully eloquent article:
I'm off to wait for the next book I've ordered from the series. But, if you had to pick just one thing to read this summer, please let it be Charmed Life.
It's the first summer in nearly two years that I have had the chance to read for reading's sake.
First, Oh My God, Oh My God, why did I ever stop doing this?
"What!" I hear you protesting, "But you're a humanities, grad. And one working in cultural studies and literature at that. How the fuck could you pull that off without reading?"
And so, I hasten to explain. I *do* read for school.
Thanks to coursework, more than I like, sometimes.
Specifically, what I don't like is that I have to cram so much reading into a regular semester that I, (like several of my fellow grad students), have devised a way of reading for processing *ahem* key information.
Thanks to the sheer amount of reading assigned, and to the horrible insecurity-generating environment of grad school, reading in / for a grad classroom, is so often transformed into some warped version of Toddlers and Tiaras. This has, of course, transformed my reading pattern for the worse.
Summer provides the only respite - since I usually can't afford to take classes over the semester.
But I've spent the last two summers (my only free time), working on classes and writing a thesis. This summer, however, I'm reading for reading and that's a huge relief.
Over the last two weeks I've read (among other things), for the first time, "The Chronicles of Chrestomanci", Volumes I and II, by Diana Wynne Jones. Although the name had been on the periphery of my reading for a while then, I only picked up Diana Wynne Jones after she died last year (read Neil Gaiman's very personal post about saying bye to DWJ). Nearly everything I'm thinking about her work has been said before.
Her craft is incredible. Farah Mendlesohn points out in this wonderfully eloquent article:
Many of these novels are intensely complex works which work with many different types of fantasy, urban, absurdist, fairy tale, often gleefully mixed in together so that, as in Hexwood, the reader has to continually adjust their expectations about what kind of book they are reading. Jones didn’t just “not talk down to children” in that old but valued cliché, she talked up to them, expecting that if they didn’t understand something they would go and find out, or if they didn’t understand it now, they would greet its source with the joy of recognition later. Her books are intensely layered with myth mixing with physics, musicology with metaphysics.Since reading the Chrestomanci series, I'm a little bit in love with Chrestomanci - Christopher Chant, specifically (but also the post in general). But, more than that, I'm in love with Millie-The-Living-Asheth (from Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant) and with the power and fullness of her characters. And, I respect that her fantasy, while it is written *ahem* for children, is not escapist.
I'm off to wait for the next book I've ordered from the series. But, if you had to pick just one thing to read this summer, please let it be Charmed Life.
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