Spring Quarter!!
Me and all of my friends working and chilling on “Rinc Beach”
My friend Jonah and me on “Rinc Beach” once again
Spring quarter at Stanford is awesome. Everywhere you look, everyone is outside (wearing 30 SPF, of course). The lawn in front of my dorm has been named “Rinc Beach” because at any moment you can find a crowd of people working, playing, or listening to music outside. Plus, my classes this quarter are very chill. I wanted to take it a little bit easier spring quarter after taking 18 units winter quarter so that I could enjoy the sunshine.
I am taking intermediate Spanish, which is a lot of fun, a poetry class, and an intro-seminar called “Top Ten Books,” which is my favorite class that I have taken so far at Stanford. It is a small class–about 12 people, with a professor, and we read the ten books most often taught in English departments in colleges and high school and talk about the books and what makes them “classics,” and argue over whether they should be or not. When I explain this class to people, they always want to know what are the “top ten books,” so here they are, in the order that we read them in (I can’t figure out how to make the blog have italics or underline, so just pretend that the book titles are formatted properly):
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (short story not book)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
We just finished reading and discussing The Sound and the Fury, which was super intense and a bit difficult but I really liked it. I had read almost all of these books before, so I am getting to read them again which I love because you miss so much the first time you read most books because you are just trying to figure out what is going on.
The end of the year is approaching and people are getting very nostalgic already, we are creating yearbook pages for our dorm and I get teary-eyed sometimes when I think back on the year. I can’t believe it’s almost over!! I honestly feel like I just moved in, but at the same time I feel like I have learned a lot since then and am not entirely the same person. Its funny how time does that sometimes, isn’t it. I’m excited for summer though, to go back and live with my mom and dad and Stormy (I missed her so much). I am still finalizing my summer plans but will write another post when summer comes around and I have more time to write!
I hope everyone is having a wonderful spring!
-Amy
