Reading, Reading, Reading

My last semester here at Geneva is a reading semester.  Kind of a new change of pace, considering the last several semesters have been dominated by writing.  But this time I'm taking mostly lit classes, and an independent study in novel-writing (and the novel doesn't even necessarily have to be finished, just what I have has to be well-written and coherent) so most of my time will be spent reading.

I'm taking a class on C.S. Lewis, Masterpieces of World Literature, Old English literature, Political Science (required for the core), and Cinema (my favorite class so far...we get to sit around and listen to a quirky flower-child professor talk about film techniques, then we watch an interesting movie and talk and write about it.  That's it!).  Over the course of the semester I'll read most of Lewis' philosophical works (The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, etc.), and The Iliad, all 3 parts of Dante's Divine Comedy and the Brothers Karamazov, and lots of Anglo-Saxon poetry (I even get to learn to speak Old English).  Oh yeah, and that poli sci stuff...theories and whatnot.  Not so looking forward to that.

I know I'm going to have a great time reading all these things (and thinking and writing scholarly papers about them too), but all this will leave me with much less time to write creatively (except for working on that novel...funtimes!).  But I know I shouldn't complain, since even my greatly reduced time is still a lot greater than a lot of people's time in the real world.  So I guess I should count my blessings.

And besides, reading the classics will (or should) help me in my own writing.  Now that I have a writer's eye--an eye for little semantic details and grammatical nuances--reading all these things might help me in finding my own style.  And after the frantic writing of earlier semesters, I think this relaxed, almost leisurely novel-writing experience should be pretty restorative.  I was starting to get tired of writing, because I had to do it so much at regular intervals that the magic seemed to fade away.  But now I've got a new lease on the writerly life and I think it'll be fantastic.

Now to go hit the books!