My school's summer reading is still a task for me. The AP Core reading involves a select work of fiction, a select work of nonfiction, Habits of Empire, about American expansionism and imperialism, and the reading of newspaper articles and the creation of an annotated bibliography. I have read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye which was her first novel and is an engrossing piece of the most extreme of emotions concentrated into poetic narrative and the sharpest of prose. I have also read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, the second of his three internationally bestselling works of social science, this one focusing on the formation of snap judgements, and how the exterior and interior, and conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, create snap judgements. At times I felt Gladwell might be pushing it a bit with his personal and highly casual narrative of describing events and people, pinning down his core points, and pointing out the significance of a few things with some Steinbeckian repetition, but he is nevertheless convincing for his ability to point out that things DO work out without such certain focuses that have been so passionately developed.
My AP American, which is the third book, is hard to come along with. It's like picking up the thousand-some page Palmer & Colton Euro textbook again (People who have known my pains, hear me!) and reading a chapter each day. As for the newspaper articles, I've read two and must read three more... I have reached exuberance.


Next comes to mind Knut Hamsun, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920. I read Hunger, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Norwegian writer struggling to produce work and live decently, failing to do so, wandering the streets of present day Oslo, pawning his clothes and other things, undergoing spells of madness, talking about death, and scorning till the very end, inwhich he sees the city he is leaving in all its glorious light. It is based on his ten years spent in squalor, compressed into a few months of fictitious first-person narrative. The strange diversity of the subject at hand was what manged to catch my attention. The crazes he goes through are some of the most disturbing events in literature.

I am quite confident that things will work out in the weeks that follow, including the first of school. It'll be crazy, but I know that I have my cushions and my umbrella.
As usual, your words are superb. Your choices are a reflection of your wonderful mind, intense, intelligent and exuberant! Thanks for the post.
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