It was like torture to read (but I must say better than Orientalism), but I liked it because it’s going to be so incredibly useful when I start writing my dissertation.

I’ve been reading this for a month? I better hurry up and finish this.

Now that I’ve read Orientalism (twice) I realize I had to find the right way of reading this book. And that way was not to read every single solitary word. I got too bogged down and couldn’t figure out what the heck Said was trying to say. The second time around, I looked for key points and I wrote a summary after each section. That did the trick. Not only did it help me get a better handle on what was going on, it helped me determine the shape of Said’s argument in Orientalism.

So I’m grateful to Orientalism, because I think it helped me figure out how to read the rest of the literary theory and secondary source material for my comprehensive exams.

Four chapters down and lots more to go. I’ve gotten past the first three chapters, which are from Stephen’s perspective, and I’ve moved on to Calypso, the first chapter with Bloom. I find Bloom’s narration a bit easier to get through, because Stephen’s chapters are so esoteric in nature that I keep having to look up tons of references in my book of annotations for Ulysses (which I might add, is actually longer than Ulysses itself).

This isn’t my first time reading the novel, but this is the first time I’ll have read the chapters in order. Right now, I’m having a hard time preventing myself from skipping ahead and just reading my favorite chapters—Aeolus, Cyclops, Ithaca, and Penelope. They will be my reward for getting through the other, more difficult bits. However, I will say I find myself liking Leopold Bloom more and more with this reading. I found the Calypso chapter a more pleasant read this time around, and I hope the same will be true of the other chapters.

Reading Dubliners reminds me just how much I love James Joyce. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around all of the stories yet, but it’s Joyce, so it typically takes a couple of reads to really begin to get anything from it. By far, “The Dead,” was the best story in the collection. Never have I read a book with a more beautiful poignant ending: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Food for the soul that is.

Because I loved A Room With a View and Howards End so much. However, the end of the novel falls short. The last few chapters are anti-climatic and a bit on the boring side.

This book was more Grant Allen’s treatise on marriage in the late nineteenth-century than a novel. However, in the end, the novel reluctantly conforms to nineteenth-century standards of morality which leaves the ending a bit ambiguous.

Ultimately, the debate over whether this is a feminist or anti-feminist novel more intriguing than the novel itself.

I’ve never seen a Studio Ghibli film I haven’t liked, and this was no exception. The film’s art was gorgeous and the plot itself was interesting. However, Tales From Earthsea is not my favorite Ghibli film. This was mainly because the quality of the animation is not up to Ghibli’s normal par, and I didn’t find the story as engrossing as Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away.

It’s really dense reading! And honestly, I’m not inclined to read it when there’s so much fiction I could be reading instead. But, it’s on one of my comps reading lists, so it must be finished…eventually.

A very engrossing novel. I put off doing everything yesterday because I got so involved in this book. And, best of all, it was really nice to read something that I really enjoyed for my comprehensive exams.