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What are you reading?


Kelkel

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UNC and Duke run a miltiary history program togeather that has a lot of faculty but frankly military history can kind of ghettoize you in the historical profession, both because of the bias of academics and because there is so much poorly written military history.

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I'm currently reading Modris Eckstein's Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Dylan Penningroth's The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, and Patricia Sullivan's Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yeah, coursework pretty much owns my time.

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Pretty much finished doing research reading for the semester. I picked up Charles King's Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams over the weekend so maybe I'll get to that soon.

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in addition to reading and re-reading 3 books a day for comps prep (seriously), i'm also reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao for a caribbean literature class. i sort of hate the omniscient narrator so far. he's trying too hard to be edgy by saying "fuck" and "shit" with absolutely no force behind the words and it's coming off as really inauthentic. i'm hoping there's a twist that redeems this, though.

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in addition to reading and re-reading 3 books a day for comps prep (seriously), i'm also reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao for a caribbean literature class. i sort of hate the omniscient narrator so far. he's trying too hard to be edgy by saying "fuck" and "shit" with absolutely no force behind the words and it's coming off as really inauthentic. i'm hoping there's a twist that redeems this, though.

Strange -- if you don't mind my asking, how do you do the 3 books/day thing? I did 100 books in 90 days for my M.A. comps, but that was basically 1/day which was still somewhat of a strain... Knowing, as I do, that Ph.D. comps often involve three times as many books and not necessarily a lot more time to prepare for them, I am wondering if you would be willing to share any ideas that you've picked up...!

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in addition to reading and re-reading 3 books a day for comps prep (seriously), i'm also reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao for a caribbean literature class. i sort of hate the omniscient narrator so far. he's trying too hard to be edgy by saying "fuck" and "shit" with absolutely no force behind the words and it's coming off as really inauthentic. i'm hoping there's a twist that redeems this, though.

I loved that book!!!

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Strange -- if you don't mind my asking, how do you do the 3 books/day thing? I did 100 books in 90 days for my M.A. comps, but that was basically 1/day which was still somewhat of a strain... Knowing, as I do, that Ph.D. comps often involve three times as many books and not necessarily a lot more time to prepare for them, I am wondering if you would be willing to share any ideas that you've picked up...!

i do it very, very poorly.

i read the intro and conclusion of each book. pick one chapter per book that seems most relevant to my work or most interesting and skim it. then i read 2-3 reviews per book.

this is not ideal. i had more time to prepare and didn't move through my work as quickly as i should have, so i'm backloaded on the last 20 books. usually i did a book a day and even then i did a lot of skimming.

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i do it very, very poorly.

i read the intro and conclusion of each book. pick one chapter per book that seems most relevant to my work or most interesting and skim it. then i read 2-3 reviews per book.

this is not ideal. i had more time to prepare and didn't move through my work as quickly as i should have, so i'm backloaded on the last 20 books. usually i did a book a day and even then i did a lot of skimming.

Oh -- okay -- thank you! I did something similar for my M.A. comps (albeit a bit more in depth because of the lesser load of texts!)... I read intro and conclusion, then did a five sentence outline of each chapter... Needless to say, this didn't feel adequate either -- although I passed my comps and the grade is all but forgotten, I suppose, now that I have moved on to writing my thesis where the real scrutiny lies... Comps sucks, and I don't look forward to doing them again -- but I will admit that they have been extraordinarily useful in terms of preparing me for the kinds of utilitarian pillaging that I need to perform on texts for my thesis. :)

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in addition to reading and re-reading 3 books a day for comps prep (seriously), i'm also reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao for a caribbean literature class. i sort of hate the omniscient narrator so far. he's trying too hard to be edgy by saying "fuck" and "shit" with absolutely no force behind the words and it's coming off as really inauthentic. i'm hoping there's a twist that redeems this, though.

I enjoyed that book. He also wrote a short story collection called "Drown". If you end up liking Oscar Wao, "Drown" is a pretty good read. Sounds like you might not have time in the near future, of course...

Just finished Anna Karenina. It was... okay. Seems to be one of those books that people either love or hate, yet I don't have any strong feelings about it.

By the way, my birthday's coming up and I'm making a list of a few good monographs that might be useful to own someday. Do any early Americanists have thoughts?

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Just finished Anna Karenina. It was... okay. Seems to be one of those books that people either love or hate, yet I don't have any strong feelings about it.

I'm about 200 pages behind you on Anna Karenina, but I'm really liking it.

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I'm about 200 pages behind you on Anna Karenina, but I'm really liking it.

Spoiler Alert ... that book almost caused me to reenact the ending ... that's how depressing Russian lit has been for me unfortunately

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I've also been reading pulpish military fiction I read as a teenager. W.E.B. Griffin... boy those books have a lot more sex than I remembered.

Speaking of military fiction, have you read of the Harry Turtledove series?

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Speaking of military fiction, have you read of the Harry Turtledove series?

Only Guns of the South and that was ages ago. Weirdly it came up during a Civil War job search and everyone who accidently admitted to having read it was slightly embarrassed.

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Only Guns of the South and that was ages ago. Weirdly it came up during a Civil War job search and everyone who accidently admitted to having read it was slightly embarrassed.

Why do people treat his works like some trashy airport book? He is a fascinating author I find ... maybe I shouldn't admit this in public if the consensus is that he is a hack

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