Comprehensive Exams Aren't Just About READING Your Lists . . .

This picture is kind of emblematic of what my summer should be . . .

(1) The arginine enhanced "gym crack." (2) The super-hero fan boy realness of the Comic-Con pass. (3) The double fisting of Victorian lit with (4) the menu to a health food restaurant used as a book mark . . . Look at all my lazer thin, kiddy pool deep levels . . .

Anyways, this December, pursuant to his Doctorate in English Literature, yours truly will be sitting for a comprehensive oral exam in which he will be tasked with convincing four of his professors that he is an *EXPERT* in the major historical field of "Nineteenth Century British Literature," and two minor fields, the "Novel as Genre" and "Queer Theory."

The lists of texts on which I will be tested are all but set. Now I just need to get to reading them, and proceed to produce brilliant, insightful connections amidst their pages that my memory will preserve through the day of the exam at which time I will deluge my teachers and mentors with sparkling, electric insight thus rendering unassailable my sassy genius. Or, at the very least, inspire a "pity pass."

Reading alone doesn't cut it, however. According to this study skills sage, writing daily is a crucial element of a comprehensive exam study plan. And Leonard Casuto seems to warn that the exam itself is something of a short-term goal and institutional hoop the studying for which should be aimed at contributing to more long-term, substantive goals, namely, developing my dissertation. The Chair of my Exam Committee (one of the four), Eva, agrees with him. All in all, the reading of my exam lists should be an active, synthetic, productive, goal oriented affair, and I figure what better way to do that then to set up a publicly visible, informal-in-tone blog on which I can send ideas up a cybernetic flag pole and see if any avatar hands salute.

Right now, I am reading, as an audio book, one of my personal least favorite authors, Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers), Abelove's Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, and I have yet to choose a third something or other for "the novel."