Hi all, if you don’t know who I am my name is Ryan. It’s not too late to ask for my autograph before I become famous.
Let’s go back to the first lecture. I actually had no idea what Romance Studies was. I enrolled in this course because it has a cool name and fulfills my literature requirement. Who would register in a course without reading the descriptions? Certainly not me, right? To answer one of the prompts for this blog: I learnt what Romance Studies is about.
I read 6 books in this course: Nadja, The Shrouded Woman, The Time of the Doves, Money to Burn, and Faces in the Crowd. I can’t really pick a favourite book. The most memorable ones are Time of the Doves and Faces in the Crowd. The former was bittersweet: descriptions of the ups and downs of life made me reflect a bunch, while the latter had me thinking hard about what’s going on. A theme that stood out to me across all texts is love. All forms of love, not necessarily romance. Some were twisted and some were regretful.
Something I enjoyed in this course… are all the blogposts! We have what, like 70 people in this course? That’s 70 different ways to interpret the same thing in different ways. I go through many blogposts and got to experience the book from another perspective. In my first post, I said that my goal is to read more “nutritious” books. I think I did that. Having to write a review for every book made me read more seriously, and not just flipping through pages to pass time.
The only complaint I have is for the UBC bookstore. I like having a book in my hand. I like the touch of paper. The bookstore told me they ran out of budget to order books for the remaining year. The same university that gets from the government 5000000 times of what I will ever make in my life, ran out of money to provide the necessary material for a course 🙁 Digital pdf’s just don’t feel the same, you feel me?
Simple question this week! What do you look forward for in the second half of 2024?
Farewell 😀