A new quarter begins... (or rather, began)

Well, my massive reading project pretty much completely stalled over Spring break. (That's what working 50 hours a week will do.) I only got through one of my initial four books. I'm not terribly surprised, but ah well...

My schedule is pretty busy for this term as well, so I don't really expect to have a lot of free time to devote to pleasure reading. That being said, I do have quite a bit of reading to do for school, so I figure I might as well try to make a habit out of blogging about that.

This term, I'm taking:

A course on the history of ancient philosophy. (Reading: Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics.)

A general lit crit course... Basically just an overview of a lot of stuff I've picked up indirectly. (Reading: Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. A text that, I might add, strikes me as quite absurd. Heidegger in a page and a half? Why bother including him at all?)

A seminar on race and spatial regimes. (Reading: For the moment, Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States.)

And my final Soc course... Globalization. (Reading: McMichael's Development and Social Change... A text so rooted in identity politics that I wish I hadn't listened to all those Žižek lectures.)

I have high hopes for my phil course (took Philosophy of Social Science with the same professor... very rigorous and challenging) and my seminar. The other two... Meh. I suppose I should be thankful that they require so little.

Reading plan

I tend to make huge "To Read" lists (emphasis on huge) that I never (really) carry through with. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now. But no. I've done it again. However, rather than posting it in its monstrous entirety (allowing you to laugh at me when I fail miserably), I've decided to reveal only three books at a time. Once I finish these three, I will reveal three more. I've organized my list into three columns -- one for a major thinker (Freud, Marx, etc), one for foundational texts of technology/media studies (starting around the beginning of the 20th century), and one for (relatively) contemporary technology/media studies (starting around the beginning of the 21st century). I'll select one text from each column, so that -- hopefully -- my knowledge of general theory, historical developments in technology/media studies, and contemporary technology/media studies will grow as one.

EDIT: I've added a "Theology/Religious Studies" category to the list, making a total of four books to be read at a time.

For now, the theoretical thinker I'm concentrating on is Freud. Even though I've read some of his works for this seminar, I'm going back and starting with a general primer.

Here are the books I'm currently attacking for this project:

How to Read Freud, Joshua Cohen
Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand De Saussure
Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney
Theology: A Very Short Introduction, David F. Ford