Having settled (I think) on my English subjects for this semester, I've been interested to note the books that I'll be reading for them (although naturally the books themselves played a part in my choices of subjects). For "Reading the Subject: Freud, Fiction, Lacan", which is the only one I was always committed to, the major fiction texts are The White Hotel, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Mrs Dalloway (plus a D H Lawrence short story and Hitchcock's Vertigo); for "Contemporary Historical Fictions", it's One Hundred Years of Solitude, V, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sexing The Cherry, Sontag's The Volcano Lover: A Romance, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, True History of the Kelly Gang and Kate Grenville's The Secret River. Taking them in turn...
The White Hotel I read earlier this year, following the recommendation of a lass I met on a clerkship in '04; I admired it but didn't really like it, and I'll be interested to see how it reads in light of what I'm presumably going to learn about psychoanalytic theory etc over the coming semester. In keeping with the theme of law firms and literature, Coetzee was recommended to me by the human resources manager of a firm during my articles interview (a bad sign as far as my chances of being offered the position went, I thought, but I filed the recommendation away nonetheless); I hadn't got round to reading any of his stuff, though, before Waiting for the Barbarians over the last few days. Thoughts on that to follow...and Mrs Dalloway shall be my second confrontation with Virginia Woolf after the failed tilt at To The Lighthouse of a couple of years ago - may this encounter prove more fruitful! I started it last night and found it making more sense to me than that other did at the time.
As to the Historical Fictions books, well, Sexing The Cherry is one of my favourite books by an author who used to be my favourite author, while V is one of my favourite books by an author who may well be my favourite author right now. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I started on the bus on the way home from uni today, makes the second Márquez book I've commenced in the last month, after basically 23 years of him slipping under my radar (Steph C had recommended Love in the Time of Cholera to me a while back, and I read a few pages of it before being distracted by other things; it's still somewhere in my room). I don't know much about Morrison, Sontag or Grenville (though have been hearing each of their names forever), and am looking forward to reading them; also, never having read any Peter Carey novels despite enjoying his short stories, I'm keen to get my teeth into True History and expect the Sinclair to be good (I haven't heard of him before, but the blurb is promising).
As it happens, it's just as well that I'm reasonably enthused about that reading list because, given that there's quite a lot of other material associated with both subjects, and that the philosophy subject upon which I've settled, "Recent European Philosophy" (Heidegger's critique of metaphysics) looks as if it might understatedly be termed challenging, and that I've also a thesis to write, and that I intend to take my studies a bit more seriously this semester, I don't imagine I'll be reading much else in the way of literature over the next few months.
