So it's been a while . . .

Greetings, fellow readers! It has been too long since I've given you an update; thank you for your patience. Final paper season is upon us, and I've been buried in a morass of summaries, research proposals, and draft revisions, as well as one bizarre fact-gathering mission at the library that, I swear, could have been lifted out of a Kafka short story.

I haven't had much time for pleasure reading, but I'm hoping to change that with the onset of the summer and the return of my daily lunch breaks from working at the bookstore. I have been reading one book my friend Elli gave me last year. It's called The Book of Ruth, and it's a novel about a girl growing up in rural Illinois during the Vietnam War. If you're a fan of unreliable narrators, this is the book for you! The writing is plain and Midwestern, reminiscent of the novels of Willa Cather or Ernest Hemingway. If this book were a landscape, it would be a wide open prairie, dotted with a few solitary trees here and there, beautiful in all its loneliness.

I've been doing much more reading for class, including the research for my final paper for the American Lit seminar. I'm planning on writing on Edgar Allan Poe's second detective fiction, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." In it, Detective Dupin proposes to solve the mystery of a young girl's disappearance and death before the police do, using the newspapers as his only source of information.

This story is really weird and difficult to read, leading some critics to write it off as a failure. What I'm arguing is that Poe's story, which was based on historical events, actually has more to tell us about the problems of interpretation and the dangers of making assumptions about people based on their gender than a simple whodunit. This tale doesn't follow the typical narrative strategy of the murder mystery, but that turns out to be an asset, rather than a weakness. I've just submitted a short analysis paper, which I'm hoping to turn into a longer project, so I'll be keeping you posted with how that goes.

I wish I had more to give you, but it seems we must wait until the dust settles and I can read more books.

Until next time,

Anna