Your Horse was so High, it was up in the Sky

Dear Maria,
good evening, it's Wednesday, and I must admit, I'm slacking on the reading front. I open up Atonement with this grand intention to indulge myself in intellectual thought, when one of two things happens:
1) I realize my stomach is growling very loudly at me, and I must go and hunt for pudding. Except, wait, there is not pudding left at the convenience store. So then I have to drag my feet ALL the way downtown to buy an insatiable amount of dessert at Mclanahan's and everyone just looks at me like they know I'm wasting my life away in calories and sugar. Or...
2) How I met your Mother looks ever so tempting on Netflix, and my evening turns into a black hole of television.

Perhaps this is why I didn't accomplish as much as I'd have liked in high school. And while I agree that you were on your high horse whils't reading Shakespeare and Dickens while the rest of us subjected our friends to long and painful rants about boys (my humblest apologies), I realize it's not an entirely bad thing to be on your high horse. It just means you were past all the petty arguments and obsessions that most immature teenagers are in the midst of, and put your time to better use. And for that, I admire you.

However, as any good revelation tends to be complex, there are two parts to my epiphany: There is absolutely a necessity to catch up on the classics (in which I am sorely lacking knowledge of). So that is the answer to why I'm putting so many classics on my reading list. I mean, I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy them (thus far, Jane Eyre has been a quality read), but it also serves the purpose of being educated and thinking about the world. But I also know my taste in reading: I enjoy modern literature about people and their lives far more than older literature, and because of that, I am not totally depriving myself from John Green and Jodi Picoult. There is a time and place for modern literature, but it can't always be waved off as unimportant or "easy reading." There are many complex themes in John Green's books, and my understanding of humankind has been immensely wider after reading The Fault in Our Stars. So after much thought, I've created this lovely little reading list that may or may not be fully checked off after many nights playing Angry Birds:

1) Jane Eyre
2) Pride and Prejudice
3) Sense and Sensibility
4) Looking for Alaska
5) An Abundance of Catherines
6) The Vampire Lestat
7) Oliver Twist
8) Great Expectations
9) Slaughterhouse Five
10) Candide
11) Wuthering Heights
12) Midsummer Night’s Dream
13) The Sun Also Rises
14) The Member of the Wedding
15) The Scarlet Letter
16) Uncle Tom’s Cabin
17) Emma
18) Anna Karenina
19) Les Misérables
20) Tuck Everlasting
21) The Casual Vacancy
22) Persuasion 

 Wow. Not gonna lie, that looks slightly intimidating. My attention span better start kicking itself into high gear. 

Speaking of avoiding work, I took a lovely yoga class yesterday in attempts to ignore my finals, and I stumbled upon this lovely little poster:

At first, I was all, "why would they spend all that time creating a poster with a made up chart?" After sharing this picture on facebook, I got my answer. A lot of people think to share more humorous things, stuff that will make people giggle--maybe because it's easy to comprehend, maybe because people need in their lives, but whatever the case, it's more smart advertising. So that got me thinking. What is it about humor that is so striking? Obviously tragedy evokes plenty of emotion too, but in the busy-ness of our day to day lives, something funny seems to stop us in our tracks more than something sad. Does the kind of effect this poster has on us work in writing as well? When I'm browsing through books, trying to decide what to read next, I'm more likely to pick up a book that begins with something amusing, or witty. This could just be due to personal taste, but it seems that humor brings a strong resonance in our lives.

But then again, laugh-out-loud books are regarded less as fine literature and more as casual, easy reads. A lot of the memoirs I've been reading, such as David Sedaris' Naked and Tina Fey's Bossypants are enjoyable, but they aren't serious literature.

So would it be smart to sacrifice one's reputation in order to catch the common reader's eye? Or is serious literature just as catchy?

Peace and Ponies,
Kira

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