Books!

Perhaps the best and worst thing about the approaching semester is the opportunity to buy more books. Since the expense is so high, around $500, the pleasure is mixed with a lot of pain. Even buying used editions leaves me in the hole economically. Most of them look interesting, so I feel pretty lucky this time around.

Here's the list:

ENG 201: The American Dream
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Crime and the American Dream
Facing up to the American Dream
Plus a coursebook by the professors

ENG 351: Renaissance Studies
The Duchess of Malfi
The White Devil
'Tis a Pity She's a Whore
Women Beware Women
The Changeling
Maria, or the Wrongs of Women
Mary, Queen of Scots
This last one is around 550 pages, and I'm on page 341, with diminishing hopes of finishing it by the first day of class as the professor requested. It's a marvelous story, about a real-life queen who found herself surrounded with bloodshed, family and clan conflict, and political jealousy. It's hard to tell just how much of this was the result of her own flaws.

ENG 358: 18th Century Novel
The Rise of the Novel
Pamela
Gulliver's Travels
Robinson Crusoe
The Vicar of Wakefield
Moll Flanders
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman

HIS 217: History of Chinese and Japanese Civilization
Zheng He: China and the Oceans of the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433
Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist
A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilization

Please note, as they say, that anything that claims in the title to be brief probably isn't. If it is brief in the number of pages, the book is likely to have been printed in an extra-small font. That's just the way academic authors are.

It's hard to imagine how all these books will fit into a single semester, let alone into a single brain. Gotta try, though.