Auditing

I'm auditing a literature class right now—believe it or not, I miss homework—and one of the first readings is a selection from Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. And oh, gosh. What a reminder—I read a ton (more than is 'normal', or so I am led to understand), but much of it is...not of great quality. That is, I read a lot of good or excellent books, but also a lot from which I derive entertainment but don't really learn much.

And here's Alice Walker, tossing out names of authors and books that I should be reading instead—feminist writers, writers of colour, books that are political and have a point...or at least books that you could write a college-level paper on. (I mean—I guess you could write papers on 80s teen 'issue' lit, but it would be a very different kind of paper.)

I take no issue with the way I read and feel no (or at least very little) shame/guilt for reading a lot of meh stuff along with the high-quality stuff. But gosh, it feels good when I get into the deeper stuff—definitely more complicated, slower reads, but so many kinds of worth it.

The only trouble is that I took four pages of notes, and I've been out of class long enough that I'm not sure if any of those notes will be useful in class...