Going Slowly
Hello everybody! It’s been a minute oopsies~ I’ve been wrestling with posting/not posting, because I’m feeling the “challenge” part of my literature challenge acutely! It’s been super slow going. It’s hard when you're NOT a prodigy... or all that hardworking :((((
I keep hearing voices to just give up reading these old pieces of literature. Like, what's the point of forcing yourself to read these things? You're not even white! Why should you be learning about the Western canon of literature?? Well. I do fear tackling anything from the East Asian region because my mandarin is rusty. And it's not about old white men! It's about standing in front of a bookshop and being curious about the different books on display. Knowing that if I wanted to, I could read and appreciate these books. Rather than turning away and reading something that I know is in my ability to read/accept.
Anyway, I decided to take a look at my list again the other day, and calmly review this unit listing. And I am going to take another crack at this. I think.
I've realized that my interests just go very wide and I have to leave a lot of space for real life. So. For now, I am just going to focus on the one unit. And even then, I feel like the task list is quite substantial. Here it is:
- Finish the Iliad by October
- Plot summary for Iliad by November
- Finish the Odyssey by November
- Plot summary for Odyssey by December
- Finish the Aeneid by December
- Plot summary for the Aeneid by January
- Have a crack at the assignment question in December/January
- As an aside, I'm going to Japan for a holiday so I'm going to throw in some Japanese revision too (LOL)
I always say that I want to post here more frequently, for the purposes of accountability. But then I struggle with writing because I don't know what I want to write down. So let me list it down and keep it simple:
- Weekly: page count/what i did + interesting events + stray observations
- Monthly: plot summaries (aim to base it off of weekly notes) + rough drafts of the final essay question
We'll see how this evolves. I've been keeping private notes, but I do also want to use this place as a space for iteration and am interested to see what it yields. We'll see if I can stay on plan - there's life stuff going on at the moment (including a holiday in the near future) soooo we'll see if the momentum can be sustained. I tend to get distracted, can you tell. haha.
Write to me here.