literacy

By anders pearson 27 Apr 2001

i’m almost entirely done with my undergraduate education now. pretty much all i have left is one homework assignment, one term paper, and one final. for the last month or so i haven’t really had time to catch my breath with all the projects i was working on for my classes. a few weeks ago i was suffering from a particularly bad bout of insomnia and found myself up really late too tired to really do any work but knowing that i wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a few more hours. about then, i realized that i had almost no fiction at all on my bookshelf here at school. i had about two novels, neither of which i felt like reading for the 20th time or so right at the moment, amongst 30 or so computer, math, and electronics textbooks (which aren’t terribly appealing bedtime reading either).

so i went online and ordered a bunch of paperbacks. i grabbed a couple collections of HP Lovecraft stories (tuck had recently reminded me how intricate and immersive his writing is), willian s. burroughs’ Junky (because i hadn’t read it yet), Blood Sugar by nicole blackman (because she rocks), and the Pit Dragon trilogy (Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, and A Sending of Dragons) by jane yolen.

the pit dragon trilogy is worth an extra mention. they’re children’s books. or “young adult” level i guess would be more accurate. i read them for the first time when i was in 4th grade or so and absolutely loved them. re-reading them now, i’m happy to see that they really are just good books.

over the course of my book-buying binge, i realized how infrequently i’d been able to actually read for pleasure over the last few years. when you’re in school and having to read hundreds of pages of dense engineering textbooks every week, the last thing you want to do with your spare time is read more. so now i’m really looking forward to my soon to be “graduated” state. the first thing i’m going to do is start reading everything that i missed out on in the last few years.