Just after Xmas, two huge boxes of my things I left to be mailed to me over two years ago arrived. The delay here is for various reasons, but mostly due to my inability to accomplish things I meant to and leaving them for others to take care of. Anyway, so finally, most of my things are here, and this house is actually looking like me - lots of little nick nacks about, pictures, books....

In the last two and a half years I have lived here, various books have been sent to me, due to my plea for English reading material. O Maridão was always aggravated by the contiuous entrance of new dust collecting material, since I would usually plow through the book in about 2-3 days and then it would sit on a shelf in case I wanted to read it again. With this new box arrival, I finally decided to remove the books I have read to be donated to the Pan Am library. This is about 100 books of various sizes. A great wieght has been removed from our selves. But only to be replaced with more.

A great bulk of the weight in the new boxes was the books I moved about with me throughout college- many of them required readings for classes I took and were the $10-$20 novel or small paper back book that I would never get more than $1.50 back for returning, so I never bothered to do so. Most of them I never really read, yet managed to pass the classes anyway (what does that say?).

So now I am settling down to read them, actually read and digest them, trying to remember what it was they were supposed to teach me. At the time I was supposed to have done this, I was never able to stay awake or pay attention to the words on the page. I had attributed this to the lack of sleep, going out and partying, immense pressure kind of problem that happens to all of us during college. But I am finding that when I open them and begin, the same thing is happening - read a page and ... wait a minute, what did I just read? Incredibley boring, page long rants about German-ness, individual histories with the author, why he/she is important for history to recognize.... What was the point of that? It's gotten so bad that I am simultaneously reading three different books right now, and I cannot really remember what is in any of them...

So really what it comes down to is - why do they pick such horrible boring things for us to read in college? I mean, there must be something out there that is both entertaining and educational at the same time. They do it all the time for kids, look at Sesemae Steet, and really any program on PBS. Experts wonder why my generation doesn't read more now adays, blaming it on television and the internet etc, but I think what it really comes down to is that the only reading we have time for for several years is the most dry and horrible stuff you can imagine. And now out of some guilty feeling of having gotten credit for a class I never did the work for, I am trying to figure out why they felt this is worthwhile. Is it possible anyone enjoys these books anymore with so many more interesting things to read? I know the classics have got their place, but they were classics because they were so interesting at the time, so different, such a great message, daring etc... Surely there must be some way to update this curriculum....