The first in a series of exam related freak-outs

Alright. I have roughly 130 days before my exams, and about 88 texts to read before then. 28 of these are novels, 13 of them are books, or “selections” of poetry, and the rest, 47, is theory/criticism. This seems doable, but I’m basically starting to freak out. I know exam lists have their own idiosyncratic math where I’m not actually going to spend 1.47727 days on each book (somehow I imagine the Faulkner will take a bit longer). I feel reading for exams exacerbates my worst and laziest tendencies as a reader. I have to fight the urge to skim as it is, but with that kind of math it becomes impossible not to.

This was a lot more fun when I first started reading and my exam seemed so far in the future that it wasn’t even worth thinking about (see also: college, graduating from). My brilliant idea was to read my lists in chronological order which meant that I read my B list before my A list (see a copy of my lists and an embarrassing attempt at headnotes here). It was great for a while; I got to enjoy spending a whole 10 days reading Portrait of a Lady, and if Moby Dick seemed interminable, that’s alright – I’ve got plenty of time. But when I was reading Sister Carrie, I begrudged myself every minute over the allotted time I gave myself to read it (In all fairness, I would have begrudged ANY time I spent reading that book - what a truly awful novel). Now, I’m pissed because I feel pressured to hurry through the stuff I was the most excited about reading (i.e., Hemingway, Larsen, Faulkner, Hurston)

But part of what I was looking forward to when I started reading was the pleasure of just reading without any direction, prompt or artificial deadline from a syllabus. Now I find myself drowning in my own lack of structure. I’ve managed to stay on top of the readings (I think – we’ll see), but this is clearly not a speed-reading contest, and I still feel like I know as much about Realism, Naturalism and Modernism as when I started. It makes me really regret the way my C list turned out. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, actually, I do know what I was thinking. I was trying to combine a intellectual history of American Studies with more recent stuff that would put me in conversation with contemporary debates. I ended up doing neither of these things particularly well. Some of what appear in retrospect to be the most egregious missteps (Charles Beard? Irving Babbitt?) resulted from being too exhausted by the entire process to resist suggestions from my chair (at the list meeting he appeared to be very pleased with it – go figure [ok, I really need to cool it on the parenthetical asides]). That’s not entirely fair though. I should really take responsibility for how it’s failing to serve my needs. I’ve started compiling some books that may be more appropriate and maybe I’ll read some of those instead of what I have, or lobby to switch it up at the last minute.

At this moment, I mostly just regret spending the first week of winter vacation watching The Wire at my parents’ house rather than reading The Professor’s House.