A New Project

Hello dear friends,

As you may have noted, if you read my last post on New Year's Resolutions, this January I am beginning a new project to prepare myself for the GRE Literature Subject test. I plan to take the test in September and will be undertaking a rigorous reading list between now and then. My study guide is probably overkill for the test (which is the sort of exam that is so difficult, you can't prepare for it enough, but reasonably scaled so that it's not necessary to kill oneself in preparing). I'm viewing this process more as a way to review what I learned as an undergraduate and to develop my understanding of the course of literature in English (and some of its main influences).


I will be making comprehensive notes as I go, but I also want to write more critically about the major works I read. So, over the next several months, you can expect posts from me about the central texts in my study guide. Some of these posts will be analytical, some might just be me effervescing about how wonderful a particular work is. But my main goal will be to use particular works as prompts for creative writing--be it poems based on a work, or a short-story version of particular narratives. I hope this will be a way of fulfilling one of my other goals: to creative write more this year.

The list of major works on the GRE is long (you can find it here), so I probably won't succeed in composing creative efforts for all of them, but I hope to cover a fair number, to stretch my creativity and my understanding of the themes and elements of each of these remarkable works. Hopefully it will also provide enough material to keep this blog an engaging read in 2014.

I hope you all are enjoying the first days of the new year.