Happy 2025!

[glowingfish]

We are less than one hour into the New Year in Costa Rica.
So funny story: I have been reading "Naked Came I", the biography of Auguste Rodin, over the past few weeks. My copy, which I found in the library's free book gazebo, was falling apart, which made it harder to read. But I was getting through it, and when I woke up today I had about 80 more pages to read. I thought to myself "I might as well finish this in 2024".
Then, as we got later on into the evening, I realized that it was 11:30 and that I had set it down and still had almost exactly 30 pages left to read! I thought I read at about a page a minute, so I started reading, and looking up to see that as the clock went down...I had the same amount of pages remaining. Down to 10, 5, and 2 pages, and 10, 5 and 2 minutes...well, the book was about a page longer than I had calculated, and so the big fireworks started going off just as Auguste Rodin was on his death bed. So I missed my totally arbitrary goal by 1 or 2 minutes.
Okay, and also, maybe I shouldn't have given myself such a weird and arbitrary goal, but: it did inspire me to finish something.
And maybe that is a metaphor for 2024.
But now, by which I mean we, and probably the reader, is in 2025.

Comments

[levi_adams]

I've been needing to read a lot for deadlines (for the MA that I'm doing) and so I've been doing quite a bit of this sort of thing, calculating how much time I'll need to read x number of pages. It helps with motivation and to keep me on track! Sorry to hear that you were so close and didn't quite make your goal.

[glowingfish]

Later, I realized that since I had actually acquired the book in a different time zone, I still finished it before midnight in a way! :)

Also, what is your MA in?

[levi_adams]

The MA is in Literary Studies.

[glowingfish]

Oh, I a Professor of English myself...in a different sense, of course!
Do you post about your studies? Should I read back in past entries before asking questions about what you are studying?

[levi_adams]

Oh, it's okay! My posts don't go back too far, and most of those weren't written with an original intention of having them up here. Actually, it's good practice figuring out how to explain it all, so I'll give you the long version:

My work for most of the past decade has been in health care, as an occupational therapist. But I also have a creative writing background and did a Master's in that, way back when.

My late wife had finished all but final revisions on a dissertation about Caribbean literature. She left behind a lot of personal notebooks along with her academic writing, and I want to write a book that engages with all of that material--sort of a collaborative work. I decided to move to London for a fresh start, do an MA in Literary Studies to develop my critical skills, and I'm applying to PhD Creative Writing programs now with a proposal for the actual project.

The MA is pretty broad, so I've been reading a lot of different stuff. But I'm realizing that if I were trying to go down a career path of criticism I'd be most interested in the Modernists and early-to-mid 20th century literature more broadly.