/lit/ - Literature

My girlfriend is finishing her PhD in Spanish lit so she reads circles around me (I finished my MA in English and stopped). Also, she doesn't have any time to read anything off her list, so the only time we read the same thing, it's because I choose to read something she has to read, and I just finished my program, so I haven't done that except when we were in the same class one semester. I don't think that counts really.

Before I was dating my current girlfriend, I was hanging out with a girl from Colombia that was practicing her English. I read 100 Years of Solitude while she read the books I lent her. Unfortunately, most of my library had been lost to a black mold infestation, so I lent her an Etgar Karet short story collection (the Busdriver who Wanted to be God, or something like that. We both liked that a lot) and As I lay Dying. These were pretty much the only books I still owned at the time.

I do miss being able to share books and talk about them with a significant other, but the entire time I've been dating my current girlfriend, one or both of us has been in grad school, so reading outside of classes and reading lists is too much of a chore to share the experience. I still haven't quite settled into the idea of reading for pleasure on my own again. I decided to pick up one of the novels I didn't finish in grad school, and I actually enjoyed it. I don't think I even tried to think of the paper I would write about it once.

>>9707798
To be fair, there are cracks in the hyper-masculine surface of his writing. This is not to suggest that he was gay or transgendered, just that there are contradictory elements in his writing. I think it's fair game to look at these, as long as we don't try to project insights from his writings back to Hemingway the person. I mean it's pretty sloppy criticism if the whole point is to glean something onto the biography of a writer.