zesty_pinto | Excuse me as I rant about

Yes, American Lit. I have survived a semester of english-intensive courses, and out of all of them, the one that gave me the most work was American Literature.

What amazes me about the course is how much reading I had to do. I mean, overall it wasn't the most reading-intensive (I had a 20th century literature class that had me read a book a week, basically). What it gave me, though, was a lot of dense time-obscure work. These last few weeks were the worst because I had the worst matchup of all:

"Walden" and "Moby Dick"

Walden. Yeesh. The work that people comment as the book that really can't fit any genre. It took me a week of careful reading before I felt I thoroughly read the first chapter. I'm sure there's someone out there that can tell me how much they enjoyed reading it, or how much they gleaned from it, but as a work that took several weeks for me to go through and extricate ideas from... I was annoyed.

I wouldn't complain as much if I didn't have Melville's work right after. I never knew boredom until I read the book about the man who talks about the man who talks about the whale. I had to get behind in my other work because of Moby Dick and its continuous rant on how to whale, whaling terms, and biblical implications. It amazes me that I can read Nabokov and get something out of it in a week, and yet Moby Dick is still unfinished because I had to trudge through 400 pages of lethargic philosophy on whaling, meeting ships, and Jonah.

I guess this wouldn't annoy me as much if this wasn't a 200-level course. :\

Okay, rant over. Might as well finish this book once and for all so I can catch up with my work.