(no subject)

Doing tutorials for a class teaching The Turn of the Screw, The Great Gatsby, Dracula, Waiting for the Barbarians, Waiting for Godot, some Canadian novel; next year The Maltese Falcon, a graphic novel called Louis Riel, Douglass's Narrative, Inherit the Wind, Slaughterhouse Five, Lolita. None helpful for my research but the James, Coetzee, Hammett, Vonnegut and Nabokov do fill some gaps. Sometimes surprises me how many standards I never got to, or more commonly got through - prior exposure to film versions usually being to blame. From 15 to 20 or so, a period during which I must have watched one, maybe even two thousand movies, I didn't think I'd become a book dude, so seldom bothered reading the novel first. But pedagogical pressure should restore whatever reading incentive's lost when you're too familiar with the plot and concepts.