Intro

So, the purpose of this journal is going to be, more or less, to keep track of what I think about books I read. I read a lot, and think a lot about what I read, but a month or so after I've finished reading a book I was really passionate about, I couldn't tell you what I thought or why I liked it so much (although I will remember that I had thoughts, and that I did like it.) Seeing as I now have a degree in literature, I feel like people expect articulate thoughts from me than "Oh yeah, it was amazing, it was really-- you should read it." I want to keep track of my thoughts for my own sake; if other people want to read them, that is great, but not something I'm looking for.

This summer, I've designed a little curriculum for myself. I did the same thing a couple summers ago, when I felt that my reading experience up to that point had included way too little 20th-century literature. It was a great summer, I read a lot of really important books, and I felt like I had rounded out at least one deflated area of knowledge. This summer, it's "world literature", which I realise is an impossibly broad category, but it's a broad area in which I have done almost no reading. So far, it's been mostly writers with exotic-sounding names who nevertheless write in English and probably live somewhere in the States, but one has to start somewhere.

This is what I've read so far this summer, not counting some nostalgia reading I did in June:

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

That said, I'll begin the next post with thoughts on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.