Summer 2008 - Reading

What's on the bookshelf this summer?

GMAT review guides excluded, my summer reading endeavors probably began as I stumbled across Ivan Panin's Lectures on Russian Literature. He traces through Puskin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy - comparing each to English contemporaries and documenting their fascinating progression of style. Thus came the obligatory trip to a trendy little used book store, where the acclaimed works of all but Pushkin were acquired.

But convenience found me digressing from these to a more intimate peice, one accessible on my Treo - I managed to put Adobe Acrobat on my phone, and randomly choose to loadJane Eyre. Since that day almost a month ago, I've read half the book during the commute to and from work - and at other sudden intervals throughout the day. I've become even quite adept at reading while walking.

But as this weekend proved lonely, I resolved to accelerate my progress and purchased the softbound book just two days ago. This allows me to highlight what I term "enjoyable phraseology." Charlotte Bronte has a way with words that anything from my limited reading experience has fails to parallel.

To excerpt on highlighted section - the emotion is amusing - Eliza's diatribe against Georgiana: "Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strenght; if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miseralbe. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon; you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered - you must have music, dancing, and society - or you languish, you die away..."

To which the reply from Georgiana eventually comes, "Eliza, you might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade."