So, it's still summer.


That's really all you need to know. It explains my lack of updates, because clearly without an abundance of assignments to avoid with procrastination I am not able to update a blog regularly. Well, I also plead that I've been spending a bit of time in Coralville at R's place, and I never take a computer over there. Besides, let's be honest. You can all guess what I've been up to: reading.

Yup. Give an English PhD student some spare time--genuine spare time--and what will she do? Bury herself in about three books at a time, of course. I finished Force of Circumstance, the 700-page third installment of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs this past weekend in South Dakota, and meanwhile have been slowly making my way through The Fountainhead (yes, you read that correctly; I am reading it on both R and Zach's heavy recommendations) and two days ago started to reread Wuthering Heights. Before that I sped through Jean Rhys's unfinished autobiography. Have I done any of the ambitious career-related reading I had every intention of doing? Have I opened any of the important feminist texts that were recommended to me by my Sentimentalism professor, or the "Introduction to Everyday Life in Cultural Studies", or the many, many, MANY books of essays by Roland Barthes that already live on my bookshelf?

No. But I will.