Tag Archives: reading

Hide and Seek

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This little copy of Foe by J.M. Coetzee is – mercifully – the shortest book I’ve been assigned this semester. It’s so small, I almost lost it! Isn’t that cute! It’s hiding from me!

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It’s also small enough for me to have read it straight through in one night during this past week of sickness and erratic sleeping patterns. At some point, I drew a highly lucid diagram, which was intended to summarize the plot, on the back of the book receipt. I just looked at it again today, and it’s pretty much a series of concentric circles (but three-dimensional!), with the middle circle representing Crusoe’s island. You know, because that’s the one constant in this story.

Clearly, I was not in a state to be reading something so surreal.

Confession Time

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On top of neglecting my blog and drinking more Starbucks than I should, I did something very bad this past week.

For the first time since I’ve been in grad school… I slept through a class.

Right now, my 20-year-old self is howling with laughter: “What, one class? All year? Try almost failing your Tuesday/Thursday Women’s Studies course because you never showed up on Tuesdays.”

But I feel horrible. It ties in with the whole “making sure I get my money’s worth” out of this programme. One of my fellow students calculated that each class meeting is worth €200.

To be fair, I overslept because I was up late reading. I’m still struggling to pin down a routine with this two-books-a-week course load. Plus, there is so much extracurricular reading I want to do right now. (Thanks, Mom!)

Leisurely Arts

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It occurred to me, as I was walking home from the library in the rain, that my time in Galway is going to be spent learning how to do the things I love faster. Specifically, walking – because I’ve got places I need to be going – and reading. If I’m going to work in this business, I have got to read faster.