Reading Recap: School Edition

Greetings, fellow readers! In the spirit of celebrating finals (see previous post), I now bring you my semester Reading Recap: School Edition.

For the last few weeks of the semester, I didn't have much reading to do, surprisingly enough. In my American Lit class, I finished Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, which I loved. According to my professor, it's "half as long as Moby Dick but twice as hard." I definitely see where she's coming from with that, but still, I am not deterred from the rest of the Melville corpus--it takes more than a big book to scare me away! I'm excited to be working more with Melville in my seminar next semester.

We also read Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft and a really strange novel called A Florida Enchantment, which was the bestselling popular novel of its day (think of it as the Gone Girl of 1892). Both of these were shorter works that deal with more of the fringe aspects of the Confidence Man trope: one being the nonfictional narrative of two escaped slaves, the other a story of magical seeds which cause sex change in those who eat them. These were not my favorite books in this class, mostly because the writing is not very good, but they are important because of what they tell us about the types of stories that get included in the canon of the Confidence Man.

We spent most of the last month in my Shakespeare seminar working on King Lear, which is so beautiful and depressing it makes me want to weep my eyes out every time I read it. So much of it is hard to stomach, but after reading it, I can no longer call Gonoreil and Reagan the "bad daughters." Lear is the true villain of the play, lusting after Cordelia, tyrannizing others with his monopoly on language, alienating his friends with cruelty. In many ways, Gonoreil and Reagan were just giving as good as they got, and poor Cordelia was just trying to survive.

With this pretty dim view of the nuclear family fresh in my mind, I transitioned to The Tempest, a play with a *slightly* less terrible father at its head. This is one of my favorite plays, not least because it's one I've performed in. It has some of Shakespeare's best pieces of poetry, and the whole thing is an homage to language itself (I'm one of those people who loves meta-everything and self-reflexive texts.) Reading the play took me back to our performance of it last year and my many fond memories of the cast, which was a great way to end a tough semester.

That's all I have for school reading; now that break has begun, you can expect many more reviews of pleasure books--huzzah!

Until next time,

Anna