#tbh. books that made me feel stupid this year: thomas yingling's hart crane and the homosexual text. i tried to read this and it was

[catominor]

This Years Thoughts On Reading. tbh

the past year i read a lot more than i had in quite some time. to be fair, i didn't finish most of the books i started, didn't start most of the books i want to read, and spent most of my time wasting time on social media still (i don't know why i can't stop doing this. i don't even enjoy it past a certain point). i didn't do well in my university classes. but for a really long time i've found it very difficult to read at all, even to read fiction. i read a lot of fiction (by my standards) this year, especially historical fiction set in ancient rome (though i also read some other good books, favorites among which are probably queer by william burroughs, night side of the river by jeannette winterson, and invisible cities by italo calvino. i also read quite a few short stories and a bit of poetry), i read or started /some/ nonfiction, i read or started /some/ ancient literature, and i had a poem and a short story published in my university's poetry journal and newspaper respectively...

but, really, i feel a little in over my head. i don't really feel like i can do this, by which i mean i still don't think i'm trying hard enough at university. i feel behind everyone else, despite the fact that since i've transferred to a different university having done 2 years before, i still have this and another year before i graduate. even though most of the people in my year will be 2 years younger than me i feel like i am behind them (did i mention that i did badly on my exams last year?)

especially before university i was never a particularly good student, honestly (i was like. a C average, though in my 3rd and 4th years of high school i started to try a little harder) and i think i spend a lot of time now fruitlessly wishing that i had tried harder and taken more of an interest in things. i still wish i tried harder. i still wish that passion was enough to fuel me to actually focus on filling out my historical reading. i wish i just didn't feel so stupid sometimes, honestly. sometimes i'll open a book that's a bit dense or technical and it just makes me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. i wish i was better at articulating my thoughts. i also wish i understood literary analysis or criticism. in a lot of ways now i feel dumber than i was a few years ago, and i don't know why.

#on a lighter note at least i can post about cato on here.even though i may be stupid i think i can be a little funny about history sometimes #tbh. books that made me feel stupid this year: thomas yingling's hart crane and the homosexual text. i tried to read this and it was #utterly incomprehensible to me. which was so sad because i absolutely adore hart crane he's my favorite poet. and also weird cause crane's #poems are also very obscure and hard to understand but one of the few things that makes me Not feel stupid is that i enjoy them and at leas #sort-of understand them to the degree one can (even people who study him admit that he is very difficult) #and books that made me kind of feel stupid but also feel like reading them was making me smarter: girard's violence and the sacred. i am #only like. 2 chapters into it and it takes me days to read one because it's so dense however it's one of those books that like. i can feel #it reordering the way i think about things. it's sooo fascinating and good and i started it cause i heard ppl talking about it on here #honestly i think a lot of my problems around the kind of thing in the post with school though is that i was always this person where everyo #would constantly tell me how well i could do if i would only try harder. but the problem is i just Couldnt try harder. i dont know why and #still dont know why i cant do it. it was constantly told to me that i had Potential. but i can never.actually access this supposed Potentia