Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Monographs

I teach at a school that assigns more than the average amount of reading. That's fine. Each of my 3 courses gets 5 or 6 books that we spend a day discussing in addition to articles and chapters many other days. But once or twice a semester, I have multiple monographs to read the same day that I have not read.

Tomorrow is one of those days. I am enjoying the books very much. One is Ari Kelman's A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, for my Hurricane Katrina course. For my labor course, I am reading Kevin Boyle's The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968.

The problem is that I am too shortsighted to make sure I don't do this to myself. I could have brought one or both with me on Spring Break, but of course I didn't look at the syllabus. So now I am forced to finish both tonight. I'm almost done with the Kelman but I've only read the first 2 chapters of the Boyle.

Just in case you all were wondering what my life has been like this semester and why I have continued to not blog. Good times.