Summer Reading and Why Break Isn't Really a Break

Dear Kira,

To answer your well posed and, admittedly, well sourced (I like Briony from Atonement too) question I refer you to "What is Literature" by noted French person, Jean-Paul Sartre (which you'll probably have to read in a few weeks anyway). Sartre makes an argument that I happen to find very appealing; he says that every work, fiction included, only exists as the reader perceives it, which means it communicates a different thing to every reader. Thus, the reader must enter into reading the book as an act of free will; in writing fiction, the author's primary purpose is to appeal to freedom. 

What you are seeing is a selfish shellfish

Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "this is a lot of intellectual mumbo jumbo that doesn't even really make sense anywhere besides your head and your head is a really strange place", while I agree with you that my head is extremely weird, this idea is simpler than it seems. It is a manifestation of the idea of "art for life's sake" as opposed to "art for art's sake" which, in no uncertain un-intellectual terms, is SELFISH art. Don't be a lobster, write art with a purpose. To paraphrase Sartre (who is without a doubt my most favorite French person), freedom is the act of recognizing the freedom of others. No one writes in a vacuum, so, when you write you must give people the freedom to interpert your work and understand your work in ways that you didn't really intend it to be read and that's what literature is all about: freedom.

While that is lovely sentiment, however, it is not the reason I'm going to be reading a whole lot of literature this winter break/summer. Now, I don't know if you recall, but I kind of got on my high horse back in high school because I read some classics; while the rest of the world was having obsessive crushes and covering up their acne I was reading Shakespeare and, I might add, getting the jokes! Weird as that is, I've realized that this isn't so impressive in college where most people have to read all these books anyway. So, the homework I am giving myself over break is to find and read obscure literature and to get the jokes. My theme for this year is ancient Greek drama, ancient texts in general, and other non-related things. Actually, I'm not sure how many jokes there are going to be to get in Greek tragedy so, we'll see about that. But, regardless, here is my reading list:  

1. The Aeneid by Virgil
2. Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius
3.  Lysistrata  by Aristophanes
4. The Divine Comedy by Dante
5. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. Paradise Lost by John Milton (again, because I'm not sure I understood it the first time)
7. Faust by Goethe
8. Doctor Faustus by Marlowe
9. The Enemies of Women by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (and everything else this author ever wrote because his novels have some seriously interesting titles) 
10. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
11. The Crucible by Arthur Miller (because once is never enough)
12. A Dance with Dragons (because A Song of Ice and Fire is a song I like to listen to) 
13. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
14. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
15. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
16. Persians by Aeschylus
17. Oresteia by Aeschylus
18. Medea by Euripides
19. Trojan Women by Euripides
20. The Gods of Our Fathers by Herman Stern (for some good, old-fashioned, healthy non-fiction)

If I actually read all those books, I'll let you know. So, Kira,  I pose you the question, feel free to answer it however you like, what are you reading and why?

María