Yup, unfortunately the early bird doesn't always get the worm. That was me. With my English readings.
Siggggghhhhhhhh—
It's fine.
After surviving my first year of university at UBCO, with constant readings, I felt like I had earned a nugget of wisdom. Which was, do. not. let. yourself. fall. behind. RINSE AND REPEAT. Set reminders. Break down your page counts. And just read. All day, every day.
Well well.
I thought that perhaps I'd get a handle on all of my English readings for my first term in August (ENGL 220 to be exact) because I'm also taking POLI 100 and Advanced Public Speaking—which I all know to be reading-heavy courses. So I did some digging. I pulled up the course description of ENGL 220, found a list of books and short stories that will be discussed in class, and went great! Now is this the book list?
I hummed and hawed over the list, then finally found an old syllabus! And my first mistake: I trusted it. I collected the books off of it and the short stories, which matched with the course description, and I decided to start buying them from second-hand bookstores.
Everything was going great!
I tallied up the pages I had to read and divided them over a few weeks and I got to work. I will say Gulliver's Travels made me want to dive out of my window (after the first part of the story, the movie part. Every other part seemed to follow the same principles but only changed the types of creatures/ people Gulliver interacted with. Mind you, this book was first published in 1726. The writing was very slow.), the other stories were okay, and I really liked Beowulf. I was even done by August 21st (I skipped Paradise Lost and one or two others).
Haaaaaaaaaaaa—
And then the official reading list came out. I scanned it and scanned it and scanned it and thought, that's it? THAT'S IT?
I wasn't sure whether I wanted to cry or move on with my life (keep in mind I was vacationing on Vancouver Island with my mom and Grandma).
The booklist looked like this:
-The Norton Anthology.
-The Pilgrim's Progress.
Perhaps I cried internally.
And I definitely clung to the shred of hope I had that maybe the readings would appear elsewhere.
After all my reading, all my note-taking, underlining, summarizing chapters and more, it was all for naught!
So I guess the real wisdom here is to just wait, or send an email and pray the prof gets back to you before school starts. At least I will rock the classroom discussions where we glaze over these stories.
Yup, I'm definitely crying internally.
BUT WAIT. PART 2!
(This is an addition to the original post!)
Low and behold! I went and got the textbook for the course early, let it sit in the bookstore bag for a day, then I grabbed it out of curiosity because it's CHUNKY and I opened it.
My eyes nearly fell out of my head.
Down the contents page were lists of all the texts I read!
AHHAAAAAAA—
It was not all for naught!
You bet I did a happy-dance upon realizing this, and then told everyone that the readings had been worth it whether they wanted to hear about it or not.
So I guess, as I leave off, I will admit that I definitely got lucky. I'm glad that I read ahead over the summer (as I look over the syllabi for my other classes and try not to get overwhelmed by the assignments) as I'll hopefully save some time and be able to balance my courses alongside my outside of school endeavors. But I'll warn you! If you're hoping to do the same, be super super careful! Send an email, double check the description, read reviews, do anything you can to determine what exactly you need to read. And know that it still might be all for naught.
Happy reading. ;)
Comments