BA and CA

Hello. My name is Emily and i am an addict of both books and caffeine. I would like to do better about these two addictions but they are just so fulfilling!!!

Yeah, so tonight I left the apartment with a sum total of $4.84 to spend. The reason? I really wanted some caffeine. I had a Borders gift card. Borders has a cafe. AS you can see, the plot thickens. Not only did I have $4.84, I had $25 that could be spent on caffeine AND books.

Now I am back home and here is the damage report. I spent $27.41 on books at Borders. Only books. So I still needed caffeine. So I went to CVS and got a 2-liter of diet coke and 2 white chocolate Hershey's bars for only $1.75! Wow! How did I feed so many addictions for so cheap? (considering that $25 of it was a gift).

I am such an addict.

But I'm really excited about the books.

So with my giftcard, I bought two books people have been telling me to read. The first is The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong. My great-aunt recommended it and Karen Armstrong is one of my dad's favorite religious authors. I'm looking forward to this book because it is about how she found more spiritual fulfillment in the study of comparative religions than in ther 7 years as a nun. I'm very interested in reading about other people's spiritual journeys because in some ways it affirms that there is still spirituality in this world we live in and it is found in many different forms and religions.

The second book is the Riddlemaster trilogy by Patricia McKillip. My sister has been telling me to read these books (they are all in one volume that I got tonight for 30% off) for a long time and I was looking for some fiction to read.

Yeah, so I bought more books. Now let me really make you realize how silly that was. When I packed up my dorm room, I had 4 boxes of books. 3 of these I put in storage and the other one is here with me at my sublet. I put them on my shelf and I realized that although I have collected these books all year, I have not read most of them. Some I bought with giftcards, or saw on the bargain rack, or had people give to me. Others were for classes that I never got to read because everyone knows its impossible to read everything assigned.

I almost forgot, yesterday I went to the Northwestern Library and got 7 books - a 4-volume edited set of Greek Tragedy, out of which I need to read all the major works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euridipes, and three secondary source books that Bud, my acting teacher, recommended to help us in reading all those greek plays.

So the current list of books/plays I'm reading is as follows (I'll keep you updated over the summer):
Agammemnon by Aeschylus
Why I Am a Catholic by Garry Wills
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
Books on Islam from my Islam class
and very soon I will add:
The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip

But I might drop Why I Am a Catholic for a little while because I'm kind of stuck at this point in a bunch of stuff about early popes which has so many names and weird religious terms that I need to take a break. I love Garry Wills (who just retired from NU this year without my being able to take a class from him. *tear*) and agree with what he has to say about needing to be open to change within the Catholic church BUT right now I'm stuck in all this dry history stuff about Rome and the papacy in the early part of the first millenium that I probably need to either skip ahead or come back to it. Interesting thing about this book, the first section was about how Garry Will's was going to be a priest but how he found his spiritual enrichment by leaving the seminary and becoming a scholar...sounds familiar to another book on my list...

Anyways, I'm so addicted to books and caffeine that writing this post while sipping my diet coke has made me really happy. More on life, the universe, religion, and everything later!