But do I throw away the cocktail recipes???
Tonight I’m trashing all of grad school, all the handouts from the conferences, all the ephemera from the other extra courses I took because I know now that I will never use that really great syllabus (or What to Do About the Creative Class or How to Write for Pay) again. And by “again” I mean I never used 97 percent of it. It’s all junk.
Then, my reward for throwing out grad school and other assorted continuing ed will be watching a Jodie Foster teen movie from the 70s called Foxes. It exemplifies the most important thing I learned in grad school, which was work really hard for two hours without procrastinating, and then treat yourself, and on Friday night, treat yourself longer.
Signs point to my finishing Middlemarch, which I’ve been reading since March 1, over the weekend, if not tonight. If you get off on thinking about how nothing has changed and how people are exactly the same now as they were 200 years ago, and also you like really adept, precise writing, then you’ll love Middlemarch. Pages 350-550 were hard to get through, though, I’m not gonna lie.
Anyway, I’m building a list of books I want to read this summer. Here it is:
I’d like to have a couple more well-written, readable novels in there that don’t fare “too depressing” on the happy-depressing scale. Last year I read The Group, and loved it. I like older novels, and if you can tell by the list above, nothing too hypermasculine. Anything svelte but not something that mocks its characters.
Do you have any more suggestions?
It will only snowball, kid.
“A really interesting discussion on Metafilter”
“It’s our boy! Our boy made it big in the Big Apple! He’s on Wooster now!”
(image via Rolling Stone)
Did you know that Bob Dylan is on President Obama’s Secret Kill List?
Write a YA novel about a girl named Winona who has serious 90s nostalgia and Judy Blume-esque issues and call it Winona Forever. Totally a best seller.
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