If I have an afternoon to kill, one of my favorite things to do is to go to Borders, buy a large coffee, and then find a new section or topic to explore. There is so much joy and fascination in finding a new field of study to get acquainted with – its like entering into a completely new world. I find that when I approach something with patience and an open mind, there is little I cannot find interesting. When I don’t find external reality interesting, its usually because I am not noticing it very carefully.
This past summer I got into political history and biography; now that I have some free time to catch up on reading, I am hoping to start getting into literature more.
First, I want to finish The Lord of the Rings. I started it this summer and had to put it down during the internship. I can already tell I am going to love it, though. Next, I want to read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I have wanted to read it for some time and keep hearing about what a difficult and profound a novel it is. We’ll see if I have the determination to get far enough into it to get hooked. Finally, I’d like to read more poetry. I used to read lots of poetry, and wrote poetry regularly throughout high school. To this day I will have lines from Tennyson or T.S. Eliot flash into my head when something calls them up. But I have sort of drifted away from that whole world. I hope I still have the capacity to re-enter it.
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