Despite some beautiful Madison weather yesterday (almost 70 degrees!), I spent most of the day inside just reading because I feel like I have so much work to do! It was nice actually — I liked feeling like I was being a good student for a change. I anticipate another full day of reading and [...]
Sunday Salon
Last week a friend slept on my couch over a night on a drive from the Twin Cities down to Louisville, Kentucky. I had homework, sadly, so we spent a quiet evening around the apartment. As it turned out, he forgot the book he was reading in his car, so I got the chance to [...]
I have three sorts of things I want to write about for Sunday Salon today, so I broke them into clever alliterative headings. “Books” is about my reading life this week, “Blogging” is about some minor changes to Sophisticated Dorkiness, and “My Broadcasting” is about some writing I had published around the web this week. [...]
All of the recent Halloween reading challenge posts are making me covet a new monster book to read. The one monster book I know and love is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, a book I’ve read so many times I consider myself a bit of a nerdy expert on it. And the best part of that [...]
This week author Michal Pollan was in Madison for a huge series of events because his book In Defense of Food was picked for UW-Madison’s first ever common reading program, Go Big Read. It feels like the whole campus has been buzzing because of his visit. Or, it just feels like the whole campus because [...]
I wasn’t sure what to write about for Sunday Salon today because my reading life has felt pretty stagnant this week. But then @thebrainlair tweeted a blog post from Jim Burke at The English Teacher’s Companion called Remember to Read which gave me some inspiration. The post is about why English teachers need to make [...]
I finished Infinite Jest this morning, all 981 pages plus all 98 pages of footnotes. I’m not sure how I feel. Excited. Tired. Accomplished. Confused. As soon as I got to the last page, I turned to the beginning and read the entire first section (17 pages) over again because those scenes are actually set [...]
I realized this morning that I have not finished a single book in the month of August. Part of it’s because I’ve been slogging along with Infinite Jest, which takes a lot of time. Even though Infinite Summer officially ends September 22, my goal is to finish the book before classes start just because I [...]
First of all, I’m annoyed Wordpress failed to auto publish my posts over the weekend. What is up with that? Anyone else have problems auto posting? This was supposed to post yesterday… From what I can tell, I haven’t written a Sunday Salon post since June 21 — that’s absurd, right? The biggest reason I’ve [...]
In order to finish up the Spring Reading Thing 2009 Challenge (results posted soon), I had to read The Year of Magical Thinking and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close back-to-back in the last week and a half. Both were great books, but also emotionally draining books. I finished ELAIC on Thursday night. About 50 pages [...]
