Lectio apud Torontum

Thank God for brilliant supervisors.

I've been driving myself crazy over the past two weeks (my God, two weeks!) trying to read just two books: The Beginnings of Western Science and Medieval Europe: A Short History. I started with these because they're surveys, and I assumed that a broad framework would be good to hang a lot of monographs on. To acquire that broad framework, I've been taking pages and pages of notes and driving myself crazy trying to remember Okay, Augustine comes after the famous Augustine, Neoplatonists are not really just parroting Plato...

Which meant that when I walked into my supervisor's office, extremely underslept and terrified, I'd only read a fraction of what I was supposed to have read for that day, and yet my brain was buzzing with questions. What is science? How do we as modern academics talk about science without being anachronistic? How can we resolve competing epistemologies?

And bless her brilliant soul, my supervisor sat me down and explained that reading is like triage. You look through the book to see what it's about, you read the parts you absolutely need to read, and you create a road map for yourself to establish what kind of resources the book can provide you with when you go back to it. "Like being in an emergency room," she said. "You see who's in immediate danger, who's bleeding out--" I snorted my coffee. "Sorry," she said, grinning.

It was a good meeting, and a good pep talk (as she put it). It's hard for me to reconcile that what I have been doing all these years is actually the right way to read: to get the measure of a book rather than ingest it. As she said, a lot of what Major Fields / Comps is meant to teach you about your material is how to read, rather than what the content is. ("You could get through what you really have to do by October," she said. Terrifying.) It makes me wonder what we're all writing for if even our peers will never read our work in detail, but that's a problem for another day.

Here begins the journal of one grad student's attempt to read 200 books in a little less than a year.

In the next week or so, I'll finalize my lists and begin reading. I have three to read from, as follows:

1. High Middle Ages, 1066-1450 (Major field: 100 books)
2. Early Modern Europe, 1400-1600 (Minor field: 50 books)
3. History of Science (Minor field: 50 books)

The latter of these will only cover science up to approximately the year 1700, and I'll slip a couple general texts in to round it out. If you have suggestions for books to add, now's the time to say!

Posts to this journal will generally take two forms: reviews and discussions of process. Reviews will be approximately 250-500 words, and will contain the full bibliographic entry. These are intended to serve as my notes for the spring 2012 exam (whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote), to provoke discussion, and to organize my thoughts in an accessible place. Discussions of process are intended to vent my madness and to entertain my dear readers.

Et hinc lectio incipit. Or, as Seamus Heaney would say,

So: