I Love Oxford. So Much.

I still can't get over how fantastic school here is. This is what I have always wanted to do. I was home schooled, so I was used to being independent in my studies. Now I get to be independent again but on a whole new level. This is how crazy my experience is: pondering the in's and out's of my next essay is more fun to me than watching a movie with my housemates (but I DO spend time with friends Mom). It's the complexity---the never-ending complexity of thinking about literature that has me enamoured.

There's a couple reasons this is being such a rewarding experience for me. For one thing, I am not spreading my time between a lot of things. I have no job and I'm taking a break from music ensembles and theater. I always did too much at college in the states, and I really like keeping it simple. And trying some new things. More on that later.

The other thing is that I really know my topics. As I mentioned before, I'm taking tutorials in Shakespeare and Victorian Literature. I've built up a good base of knowledge about Shakespeare over the years, so that was no problem. But my big accomplishment of the summer was going through the reading list of Victorian novels---the WHOLE list. I can't even describe how useful it is to be done with all the primary reading. So, instead of reading one entire Victorian novel each week along with the criticism about it and writing the essay on it, I get to relax. Doing all the reading beforehand was probably the smartest thing I've done in my Oxford experience. That way I am fully prepared to engage with the material instead of meeting it for the first time.