I mean, how can you not be interested in the folklore, and then fantasy, born from mountains like these?
I’ve written a lot of reviews, read a tiny bit of a lot of books at once and not listened to any audiobooks at all really. So I haven’t finished a lot of books these past two weeks because of reading for school and trying and failing to not be already behind one month into the semester. I do have to write an extensive essay, fifteen pages or so, about literature. It’s a so broad task that it has been hell to narrow it down. What I should write about is modernism as a literature time period, maybe take one book by Virginia Woolf and one by a norwegian author (as that’s the subject). What I want to do is analyzing “The Golden Compass”, aka Northern Lights of The Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman as a “bildungsroman” which is a more narrow definition of a coming of age story. As you may know, I am very into fantasy. But every time I’ve chosen fantasy or genre fiction with past teachers, my grade seem to magically drop even though they agreed to the choice. If everything goes to hell after the first draft, I’ll start tying in folklore or something. I need top grades on this thing, but I also need my sanity and it won’t stand up to reading Peer Gynt for four months.
So here’s the books I’ve been thinking about the past two weeks!
New book posts:
- Review: The price guide to the occult
- Review: The universe of us
- Quote of the week #10
- Quote of the week #11
- Top ten tuesday: Bingeworthy TV series
- Top ten tuesday: Back to school, nonfiction books
Other books I’ve been reading:
- Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (currently)
- South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami (currently)
- Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli (currently)
- Our numbered days by Neil Hilborn
- Betrayed by Amalie Skram
Added to my TBR:
- The magicians by Lev Grossman
- Again, But Better by Christine Riccio (so excited to read Christine’s new book when it’s released next year!)
-
Sea Prayer by Khaled Hosseini
Three things on my mind:
- I really like lists, don’t I? Especially to-do lists, they are so satisfying, but it comes with the downside of if I am stressed enough I will just remake to-do lists and do nothing on them.
- I need to read more poetry again. I feel like I stopped because I felt I don’t give each poem enough time when I read through a collection. But is there really one right way to read poetry? I usually have one read-through for enjoyment, especially if the poet is new to me, which is quicker. And then I bookmark poems that interested me and delve deeper into them, considering content more often than form, unless the structure and writing is spectacularly good.
- Last weekend I partied. This weekend I am going to do relax as much as possible and not feel bad for it, but also study a bit. Tea, trees and blankets are my vision for this weekend. Also figuring out uncertainities of a physics experiment for school, which we spent four fucking hours on going through theory and performing. It was an easy cart down a ramp as well, actually getting the data took like ten minutes.
aquapages 
I’m also really interested in reading Christina Riccio’s book! I’ve been following her writing update videos since the beginning in 2016 and want to support BookTube authors who have put in the time and effort to craft good books. Also, your paper sounds fascinating. There’s a lot of scholarly research on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy so as long as it’s a well supported paper, I think you should be fine. If you can connect what Pullman does in his books to a more “literary” work then it might be really impressive. ❤
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I saw your great reply to my comment on the “murder in ya” post, thank you!
I’ve followed Christina for a couple years as well, and I hope the book is great and goes big, because she seems fantastic. Her writing videos make it feel so accessible, like the one watching could also get started and write a book if they put in enough effort and passion. Also thank you for the encouragement for the paper, I am considering to compare the book to some other more classic exampels or “literary” works like you said, but I haven’t quite decided yet!
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Your paper sounds cool! I’m less of a risk-taker than you, I actually recently wanted to write a paper analysing the His Dark Materials series in the context of the teachings Augustine and Calvin but I chickened out. (My paper ultimately was on Donne…because I’m a bore.) I can relate to the Modernism stress (love Woolf, though!) because I currently have an application statement for a course and the subject of Eliot staring at me in the face and zero words (although I love his poetry, I’m just lazy).
And I would agree that there’s no right way to read poetry, although I too find I don’t give each poem in a collection enough attention. Need more hours in the day, really…
I hope your paper turns out well, I’d be really interested to read it, although I’m guessing you probably won’t post it anywhere. I haven’t recently reread the series as a whole, just Northern Lights, but am hoping to soon. Good luck!
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Thank you! At first glance at your comment I’m immediately convinced you could do a lot better job of writing that paper than I could. Had to google Augustine, Calvin and Donne. Btw I’m excusing myself by saying I have one mandatory language class and science and physics the rest. I do also have religion though, so should’ve gotten those references. Reading up on them, that does sound really interesting. Just now realized one of the papers I’ve skimmed through and bookmarked while researching has looked at them in explanation of the dust and daemons over 200 pages, so I guess I have secondary sources if I want to barely scratch the surface of something like that. ( http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19669/1/HHS%20thesis%202017.pdf )
Goodluck with T S Eliot! It’s one thing to enjoy a writer, another thing to have to format your thoughts on it into this essay shape with enough words to hit the limit, haha. Do you study literature in uni?
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Probably not, I didn’t do much research into it really. Yours sounds like a way more accessible and solid topic. (And honestly, I think you’ve got a good excuse. I’m glad I no longer have to study organic chemistry and electrical circuits!) The bildungsroman subject has been explored with a lot of these texts I think? So you should be able to find a couple of good argument I’m sure. A bildungsroman with reference to Lyra right?
That thesis sounds fascinating, I skimmed a bit and bookmarked it. I really have to reread those books haha.
Yes I do! What do you study?
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With focus on Lyra, yes. I’m 19, but going to university next year so I’m studying “science”, but have a couple of mandatory classes. Don’t know what I want to do for uni yet, I’m interested in a lot of different things, but think I want to learn more about physics or technology
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