Week 9: Reading Feedback

Cat picture posted on Flickr by Paul Anderson

For my reading feedback this week, I needed a picture that accurately showed how my semester is going. If anyone's wondering, it's exactly like this.

To prove my point- this week I only managed to do one Reading Diary post. This is actually a little heartbreaking for me, because I generally shoot for perfection... When I sat down on my couch to do my reading Monday night, it was a little chilly, and so I grabbed a blanket, opened up my computer, and promptly fell asleep.

Fortunately, I was able to get my Tuesday reading done on time, and so I read Nine Ideal Indian Women, the section about Savitri and Damayanti and really, really enjoyed it. I love having the choice to explore options in the second half of the semester, especially because I don't have much time to fit in reading for pleasure in my schedule. Reading for this class turns out to be the much needed break I usually need from technical classes. Now that I'm choosing what I'm reading, it's that much better!

I also didn't mind reading on my computer this week for Nine Ideal Indian Women. Sometimes, the free options trumps personal preferences, and this was definitely one of those times. I'd like to read for the week tonight so I don't have as much to worry about during the week, and next week I'll be back to outline how that went!

Week 7: Reading Feedback

Image of a book on a laptop, from Pixabay

This week I read from an online source, since I usually avoid reading on my computer screen like the plague. As expected, I did have a harder time focusing, and since I tend to do my reading late at night (entirely my fault) my eyes were more tired after reading on my computer than normal. Part of me wanted to go back and read a graphic novel at the library again, but having two midterms last week, I just didn't have the time. I live on the opposite side of campus, and trudging over to the library and back takes a good chunk of time. I hope to get back over there at least once or twice this semester though, because I've forgotten how much I used to love studying at the library when I was closer by. 

I read the Five Tall Sons of Pandu this week, and I really enjoyed that selection. It was much less focused on the supernatural of the Pandava brothers, and looked a lot closer at relationships and how human emotions played with and off each other. I don't think I read it as closely as I wanted to, mostly because of midterms, but the reading took me a couple hours anyway. Combined with the time it took me to go back and read after the fact, I think the reading length was perfect. I'm interested to read more from Wilson, because his writing had such a great flow to it. 

Overall, it was a good reading week for me! Reading Narayan's version of the Mahabharata took me a lot longer, because it felt like it was so stuffed with characters that I just couldn't keep track of them all. Wilson's fixed that problem without leaving much out, and I was glad I chose to read it.

Reading Feedback Week 2

First and foremost, I think it's really cool that there are options at all for reading in this class. The fact that I could choose what I wanted to read, or which edition to read of something, has a flexibility that almost none of my other classes have. 

I chose Narayan's Ramayana because of a few reasons, the most important one being that I have a hard time reading on a computer. Fairly short articles/works are fine, but once what I'm reading gets to be ten pages or more, I can't focus and it starts to mess with my eyes. In the past, I've managed by turning up the red on my monitor, and turning down the blue, which makes it a lot easier to read. Having a print option is almost always better for me, though.

If I ran into something in the reading that I wasn't sure of, or a name I wasn't familiar with, I made sure to Google it so I'd stay on the same track. Narayan does a pretty good job of keeping names straight, though, which is helpful. There were a couple times when someone's name would change for the foreseeable future, or they would be addressed differently, and the little notes to remind the reader who was being addressed made it much easier to read. Narayan seems easy to read in general.

Image of man walking and reading a newspaper, from Wikimedia

The picture above accurately describes how I read a good chunk of the reading this week. I walk to campus instead of driving, and so I have a few minutes each day and before class to read. When I was younger, I used to read while walking, and this book is light enough to carry with one hand, so I resurrected my old habit. This is largely because I really wanted to keep reading even after I needed to go to class! Best of both worlds, here. 

The reading took me a couple hours the first time around, but I did quite a bit of back and forth referencing after the fact, so it probably added up to three hours after everything was said and done. 

Looking forward to this week's reading!