October 18 - 24

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I can't believe how much I'm actually enjoying this! My experience in the past with A Room of One's Own had me cursing the name of Virginia Woolf, and when I saw her name on one of my class's reading lists, I groaned and moaned like a... person who doesn't like Virginia Woolf. This second part, Time Passes, was kind of difficult to get through since it's narrating a house changing over years of being empty. It was surprisingly awkward since there was no real narrator and no characters. Just shadows and dust. Apparently, Woolf herself didn't even know what to do with that section and was happy anybody even liked it. Well, I plowed through it. I actually just finished the book, and what has stuck with me most throughout the whole thing is the interaction of characters with isolation, loneliness, and being alone. They are not considered to be all the same thing in this novel, and this is probably what I'm going to focus my thesis on for this year. Last time I had to read Woolf, I wouldn't even write the 5-page paper assigned, which was the first time I had ever refused to do an assignment and something that has never happened since. Now, I'm planning to write a 20+ page paper on her, and feel like I might even blow past that page length. How things have changed.

Teaching Hope by the Freedom Writer Teachers & Erin Gruwell
You know, I finally finished this, and it's a good thing. I was getting really tired of it for some reason. I've read it in sections over the course of a month or so now for my philosophy of education class, and man, it just dragged on for me. I think my issue was that it was organized by category of the story, so I would be bombarded with sixty pages of depressing stories about teaching at once. Then another sixty pages of great moments in teaching. Then another sixty about getting ready to teach. The stories sort of lost their impact when read en masse like that, and I started being unfazed and even annoyed with it by the end. (See this reflection on the final chapter where I'm straight-up annoyed.) Also in that link are my reflections on each section, which is why I hadn't been including it in these; I've already been writing about it.

Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner
I'm only 58 pages in to this book, and yet also 20 chapters! It's one of those books. It's intriguing, though. I'm feeling aspects of other books creeping into it, which is a little unimpressive, but I'm still curious to see where this next dystopian-based book heads. To the moon, apparently. (Also, how is it possible that the Google Chrome dictionary doesn't have dystopian in it?)

King Lear by William Shakespeare
You know, I'm pretty unimpressed with this one. It could be because we're reading it right after Othello which is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, but King Lear is just sort of boring to me. He's a father who makes his kids play the "who loves me most" game until they get what they want, get sick of him, and decide to kill him. Now, I think their decision to kill him is disturbingly extreme and sudden, but he's also been super childish in his dealings with them (not to mention sort of an idiot, as is expected from our tragic figure of the play's title). Oddly enough, I kept feeling like I had read this already and then I realized it's because Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse is just as needy and childish towards Mrs. Ramsay (and basically every other woman in the novel).