Saturday, June 21, 2008

Books and Summer

Yesterday, my brother and I went to the library and we both borrowed a stack of books each. I really miss not being able to do this during the school year. Just too busy to be reading about random things that I find on a shelf. I just finished reading a graphic novel called "American Born Chinese" and a biography called "Tuesdays with Morrie". Both are extremely well written and I would highly recommend them.

The graphic novel is very funny. The author managed to deal with serious issues with a cool sense of humor.

Tuesdays with Morrie is about a sociology professor who was dying from ALS (a disease that slowly paralyzes your body). It is written by one of his former students who flew over every Tuesday during the last few months of the professor's illness and they talked about how people should live their lives. The professor was an extremely optimistic person and I thought the book was amazing.

Anyhow, the next books on my list are linguistics stuff. I hope they're interesting. The main library in Oakland doesn't seem to have much on the subject. I mean, it has a decent amount on language. It's got its own corner. I didn't managed to find a good Learn Spanish kit (book + audio) this time around. I did managed to get the Michel Thomas course for German, which I think I might already have. Anyway, I might try that out with my brother. I think he might be more interested in a computer program though. You know, one that is designed for kids and lets you earn points, play games, etc.

So yeah, lots of stuff I want to accomplish this summer. I have about 9.5 weeks at home so need to get moving. This list includes:

- Learn a language with brother
- read some linguistics books
- study for and (take?) GRE
- research into grad school and scholarships/fellowships
- study for FE/EIT exam
- Teach brother to use Alice (computer program that lets you make 3D animations by "writing" Java)
- Keep up with Chinese (Chinesepod?)

Arg.. this list is probably incomplete and there's too much on it already!

1 comment:

yalu said...

Interesting. I have to say, that list sounds extremely ambitious. And I am usually the ambitious one. Also, some items on that list sound incredibly intimidating (find out and study for GRE?) man…I feel like I should be working hard this summer!

Actually last night I spent an hour reading my novel, so I’m happy that I’m actually doing some reading over the summer. I mean, there’s definitely not time at MIT, so summer’s really the only time. I should also be prepping for interviewing and maybe doing these other things as well, but I figure that some combination of reading/prepping, and then spending the rest of my time exploring (you know, having fun and trying new things) should be okay. I mean, in France after all.

Need to get a Boston Pub Library card, maybe. So farr away tho. MIT humanities Library?