/lit/ - Literature

>>10847825
>>10848270

>>8216519

Thank you for taking the time to reply - I address that to everyone in the thread.

Your peers sound dispiritingly familiar. I'm grateful for the compliment, but I'd be lying if I said I had approached my BA like a DPhil student - I spent my fair share of time in pyjamas watching shitty television with friends, or drinking. But I also never missed a lecture.

I was one of those classic cases at school - a bright child who during his teens, allowed himself to coast. When I wasn't slacking though, I knew that I enjoyed studying history and Latin, so I applied to read ancient and medieval history at college. But when I applied I had only THE vaguest notions of what studying history actually meant.

I left school with good results, but not as good as I could have had I bothered to apply myself. By the skin of my teeth, I got into a very good college abroad. I discovered late antiquity during my year out between school. I was working a shitty job as an insurance broker, and during my lunch breaks would visit the bookshop, mostly as a way to avoid spending lunch in the break room with my 'colleagues'. One afternoon I found John Julius Norwich's 'A Short History of Byzantium'. I had heard the word Byzantium but couldn't have told you what the Byzantine Empire was.

And that was it - I found out that the Roman empire in the east had survived beyond 476 and that there was an entire 'late antiquity'/'early middle ages' I had been entirely ignorant of, an inbetween where - to use an old cliche - the light hadn't quite died. If I had read something more scholarly I don't know if the effect would have been the same, but I was hooked.

So when I finally got to college, I was determined to stop squandering my potential, and to actually work my arse off rather than to rely on being able to coast through. I was surprised to find there were no Byzantinists nor Late Antiquarians. Almost all my four years were spent studying either high classical civilization, or the high middle ages. The inbetween never figured - except on those few occasions when I got to propose an essay title, and could wrangle something from my own reading in.

I got hooked on that inbetween space that I had to study on my own time, and that's why I applied for a master's course where I finally got to concentrate on it.

Until this year, I was very much the same - I was willing to put up with anything to have a chance at studying this stuff for a living. I worked my ass off, but it now feels like it hasn't been worth it. I feel like I'm stuck in the same 'place' in my 'career', the 'real' world is increasingly knocking at my door and despite excelling as an undergraduate, and all the encouragement of tutors and lecturers to the contrary, it now feels like I'm not actually good enough to do this for a living.

I can't really explain it. This is one of those few times when I wish we had identities here - because the replies in this thread feel like a reassuring hand on the shoulder.

>>6984654

Can anybody recommend any good books on the Indo-Greeks? Tarn is terribly outdated and Narain is proving very hard to find, as is R.C. Senior? Is there anything else good and perhaps more modern in English?

Thanks.