Christmas Reading

   Now that I’m officially off thesis-mode, I’ve been meaning to read books outside of academic requirements.  Christmas is a good time for leisurely reading, after all.  For all intents and purposes of admission, I’m still pretty much stuck in reading academic texts: I suppose I have to learn to read comic books again (like Batman), or that I should head off to Book Sale for stuff people throw away.

   As of late, I’ve been doing self-study on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, if only because I want to familiarize myself more with a great part of the philosophical foundation of my thesis.  I finished skimming over “Anti-Oedipus,” and I’m halfway done skimming over “A Thousand Plateaus.”  Then I’m planning to cap off Christmas reading the last three chapters of “Of Grammatology” by Jacques Derrida (before I abandoned it in favor of Deleuze).

   Of course, it’s inanity bordering on insanity to read philosophical texts for “leisurely reading:” a kind of self-evident, self-validating thing that reinforces common stereotypes about me.  There are a few books I’ve been meaning to read, like Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance,” and I’ve been meaning to read more on the irreverent atheism of Christopher Hitchens.  But I’m a big fan of the classics: I’m going on a bargain bookstore raid in a couple of days to look for William Faulkner.