Week #12: 2023.10

2023-03-12

Books I Finished

• Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser, Robyn Smith: This was a really cute, feel-good comic. It showcases the ups and downs of life of women and how hair grooming ties this sisterhood up together.
• Heartstopper Volumes 1-4 by Alice Oseman: I was feeling relatively brain fogged this week and decided to read something light. I have seen Heartstopper around and decided it was finally time to try it. I did not know this was a graphic novel and it was a nice surprise! The art style is rather simplistic but very cute and cozy. It’s a sickly sweet kind of plot but one that I badly needed.

Books I’m Currently Reading

• Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter Version) 6th. Edition by Nina Baym
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
• Introducing Literary Criticism: A Graphic Guide by Owen Holland & Piero
• The Lost Years of Merlin by T.A. Barron
• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf
• Flamer by Mike Curato

• Summary of things I learned this week

I’ve been making my way slowly through one of Future Learn’s courses on poetry. It’s a bit slow but so far I have learned about different forms of poems. The main ones that are covered are sonnets (14 line poems that may or may not have a rhyming scheme) and ghazals (poems of at least a handful of couplets, involving much repetition and/or rhyming).

There was a section on metre but I am terrible at trying to figure metre out. I’m trying to slowly scan through one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and failing. Even though it is mostly in iambic pentameter (one of the most common rhythms in poetry: a stressed syllable every other syllable, ten syllables per line), the exceptions are what throws me off. Reading a poem out loud can be drastically different from reading a poem out loud (if you know, you know).