Books a Plenty

I decided I would follow Christine's lead and make my excuses for not updating as regularly as usual. As I mentioned in my last post, the thesis exam is quickly approaching and I need to start reading large quantities at a quick pace if I want to be prepared. I have also made an appointment at the eye doctor so I can actually read the words I stare at. The glasses will not only help with exam preparation. I assume the glasses will also remove me as a lethal threat during night driving. I have always been loath to wear glasses, not because I think I will look dorky but because once you start wearing them, you can never go back. I've needed glasses since high school, but it is amazing how rapidly my eyesight has deteriorated over the past two years. I think what it really is, is that my eyes are allergic to pedantry. I did wear glasses briefly in high school before they started to annoyed me. Then, I wore them again for about two months as an undergraduate, but I found that they got in my way when trying to kiss David. Finally, I switched to contacts and those were fine for about two months until my left eye started rejecting them. I could either never get the contact in my eye, or after about fifteen minutes the contact would pop out of my eye. Always. So now I'm going to get glasses and just stop kissing David.

Well, what books could possibly be so important that I need to become bespectacled to read them? I'm glad you asked. Prepare your eyeballs for the literary pageantry you are about to see. The following is "Monica's M.A. Thesis Exam Reading List." If you want you can read them with me, and we can form a book club entitled "Reading the Greats: Books That Will Never Ever Help You Receive Employment. Ever." We'll start now and finish a week after spring break. Here goes.

CLASSICAL
Ovid, Metamorphosis
Aristotle, Poetics
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Euripedes, Bacchae

BIBLICAL
St. Matthew, Gospel According to St. Matthew

MEDIEVAL
Beowulf
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales - "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale"
Malory, Morte D'Arthur
Mankind

RENAISSANCE
Shakespeare, King Lear
Sidney, An Apology for Poetry
Spenser, Faerie Queene
Milton, Paradise Lost

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

TWENTIETH CENTURY
Virgina Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
William Falkner, The Sound and the Fury
Toni Morrison, Beloved

Thank God I've already read about half of this list. I'll still need to review the texts I've already read, but it'll be a big help. All in all, this is a pretty good list of books. People always criticize Purdue's English department for being liberal, but this list is extremely canonical. I mean, almost all of these books are written by dead white men: Shakespeare, Milton, Alexander Pope, Virginia Woolf. So I don't want to hear about it. Anyway, that's what I'll be doing until spring break. I'll try to update at least once a week, but if I don't, you'll know why.