Wednesday, October 30, 2013

First Blogiversary

It occurred to me the other day that it's been a year since I started this blog. A year. It hardly feels like it's been that long.

I'm still learning a lot about book blogging. In some ways, I feel just as naive and ignorant as when I first started on October 26, 2012. My blog is still just beginning.

But in other ways, I feel that if nothing else, the past year has been about integrating myself into this fascinating community of book lovers who take time out of their busy lives to share the book love online with strangers across the globe. It took me a while to get the hang of things and find blogs I wanted to read, and to feel like anyone at all was reading mine. But now I feel proud to say that I am a real, live book blogger. It may not always be easy to fit another hobby into my school schedule, but I'm passionate about book blogging. I think I have even more ideas and excitement for blogging than I had a year ago.

Many thanks to those who have kept coming to my book blog over the past year. It's wonderful to have my few wonderful friends who keep faithfully reading, and who write wonderful blogs themselves! I'm also so grateful to those who have just come once or twice. I love writing this blog and I hope some of you enjoy reading it, too.

I know this post is a little mushy and cliche, but I couldn't let my one-year anniversary go by without mentioning it! Hope you're all enjoying my little corner of the blogosphere, and I hope to be blogging for many more years to come!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Ancient Literature

I'm taking a world literature class. The first half of world literature, aka Ancient Literature. (Yes, the caps are necessary.)

I was going to try to post separately about the various works of literature I'm reading, like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Oedipus the King. Lovely stories. Only made more agreeable by the ripping off of limbs and gouging out of eyes. But truth be told, I have very little to say about these stories. In a classroom setting? I could go on for fifteen minutes about the significance of the text in a historical context and what it says about the culture and time period in which it was written. But honestly? I have no emotional connection to these texts.

Now, an emotional connection isn't really necessary in order to write a paper about it, but to say anything about a book here on the blog would be positively dull if I didn't have some sort of feeling attached to it. Love, hate, anger, whatever. Even just a vague enjoyment.

I was excited to take this class because I thought I would get to learn about mysterious other cultures and their secrets to the universe. Needless to say, this was quite naive. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Oedipus the King, and the Aeneid don't seem to have too many secrets to the universe. (Unless they go something like, "No matter what you do, the gods are going to run your life, so get over it.")