Chico Buarque’s Leite derramado (Spilled Milk) was sometimes a pleasure to read and sometimes it left me really confused (the ending). It might be a coincidence but both novels I’ve read for my Contemporary Brazilian Literature Class so far were fragmented, highly subjective retrospective accounts of characters‘ lives. I think I liked Buarque’s ( Read more... )

I read Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway. My best friend is writing her BA thesis about Native Canadian literature and residential schools in particular and I’m reading the books she’s writing about so I can read and actually understand what she’s writing about. Fur Queen is a really fast read but the last forty or fifty pages, which are ( Read more... )

I finished rereading Disappearing Moon Café by Sky Lee and it's never going to be my favorite book but I'm glad I gave it another shot because it was much better the second time around (aside from the houseboy/Janet Smith stuff, that still bored me to death although I understand why it needed to be there). I like the poliphonic mode that in fact is ( Read more... )

Some asshole egged my car last night ( Read more... )

This is my second or third attempt to regularly post about books I'm reading / have read on a weekly basis. Maybe it'll work out better this time.

I finished rereading Abeng by Michelle Cliff yesterday. It's for a paper I'm writing and it's a very short book that interlaces the history of Jamaica with the life of a twelve year old biracial girl ( Read more... )

I was at an amazing lecture by Linda Hutcheon yesterday. And I mean truly AMAZING. I wasn't sure I'd enjoy it because of the title (From Reader Response to Reader Response-ability) but she was funny and insightful and so intelligent but she wasn't one of those people who expressed simple ideas in super complicated ways like some other people I know ( Read more... )

I'm done with the first draft of my Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close paper. I finished it yesterday, making it the fastest first draft I've ever written (7.2k in seven days). Now I'm going to edit the shit out of it, one section a day, so I can go to Brazil on the 18th with a nice second draft finished. The third and forth drafts are mostly just ( Read more... )

I have a busy weekend ahead of me. I need to write about five pages of my Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close paper that it tentatively titles "'Stuff That Happened To Me': Something Meaningful That'll Explain My Research Topic". So far, it's been going okay. I'm at about 1k and my estimate is that it'll be about 6,000 to 8,000 words long. I want to ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to post for a while now but I've been busier than I'd expected to be. I had my oral exam on June 25 and even though I was nervous, it went really well and I got the best grade there is. That half hour was way more fun than I had expected it to be. So I'm officially a graduate and in grad school now as opposed to being in grad ( Read more... )

My oral exam for the bachelor's degree is on Tuesday. I have come up with six theses that I'll outline and defend during the exam and hopefully, they won't all be ripped apart in the thirty minutes of the exam ( Read more... )