School started up for me a couple of weeks ago, and I'm already drowning in homework. I know I promised a lot of reviews and updates, but I find myself unable to really keep this promise at this time. However, I will post when I can, I just don't know when that will be.

Currently, I'm in a Contemporary American Literature course and I've been reading some interesting books. I'll try to post reviews once the semester is over, even if they are just small ones. Until then, I'm going to be posting whatever comes to my mind over the course of the semester.

I'm also posting some of my writing over at Wattpad and DeviantArt, if you want to check those out.

Until my next post! (Whenever that may be...)

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It's my favorite time of the week! It's Top 5 Wednesday and this time I'm sharing my favorite required reading. The only problem is that since I was homeschooled, I didn't really have required reading. I mean, I read a ton, but I was never actually required to read anything except for once in 8th grade when I thought I'd try the public school thing (I had to read the Outsiders by S.E.Hinton, which I loved). So, the only required reading I've ever really had was once I entered college and that is why most of my picks are from my college courses.

For those of you who don't know what Top 5 Wednesday is or if you're interested in joining, it is a GoodReads group created by BookTuber GingerReadsLainey where she posts different topics each week and YouTubers and Bloggers are invited to make videos or write posts about them.

5. Bartleby the Scrivener by Hermen Meville

I think sometimes one of the texts that you work closely with and gain a broader understanding of can easily become one of your favorites. I think this is the case with Bartelby the Scrivener for me. I remember the first time I read it, it was an optional selection for a Marxism analysis in my Critical Intro to Literature class, but I ended up picking another text because this one was too long for me to read all the way through in time. However, the story intrigued me a lot and I decided to write a paper about it later in my American Literature class. I wrote about how the narrator drove Bartleby towards depression and death because it made him feel more important as he could be seen as charitable by others for trying to "help" Bartleby. It was a lot of fun trying to find evidence that the narrator was a narcissist.

I think the one thing I love about this story is that there are so many ways to interpret it, which makes each reading of it brand new.

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Yesterday was the last day for #TBRTakedown 2.0, and I had only managed to read two out of the five books that I was planning on reading over the course of the week. I probably could have read all of the books, but choosing to do a read-a-thon on a whim like I did isn't the best thing you can do to make sure you can get through all the books you plan on reading. I had other obligations to make, and I also didn't feel like reading at times. So, I decided not to beat myself up over not reading and just do what I could when I could. Reading two books in a week is certainly an accomplishment for me since I haven't done something like that in a long time.

The two books that I managed to finish were Allegiant by Veronica Roth and Cress by Marissa Meyer. They were both really good books and I will try to write my thoughts about them in the next few days. I will also try to finish the books that I didn't manage to finish in time and write reviews about them. All of the books I chose are really good so far and the only reason why I didn't finish them is because they were a bit too long and I took too many breaks from reading.

The read-a-thon was really fun and I plan on participating in another sometime in the future. I was able to talk to some really fun people about books and there were a lot of fun challenges to add to the experience of reading. I only participated in a handful of the challenges because on the last two days I was spending time with family or friends during the night and I forgot to do them earlier. I've collected those tweets in this post to share with with you.

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From July 25th to 31st I'm going to be participating in the #TBRTakedown read-a-thon created by BookTuber Shannon to smack some books off my TBR pile. Even though I only just heard about it today, it is something that I really want to do because there are a lot of books that I have been meaning to read and this will be a good way to get to some of them.

For those who don't know what a read-a-thon is, it's basically where you commit to reading as much as you can over a period of time. This is my first read-a-thon and so I don't know exactly how everything works, but I'm excited to learn. There is supposed to be contests and prizes with the #TBRTakedown as well as various BookTubers and BookBloggers hosting. For this read-a-thon there are specific categories to fill, so in this post I am going to share the book choices I've made to read during this coming week as well as a little explanation as to why I picked that book. I'm also including the page count and the amount of pages I will have to read per day to make sure that I read all of the books on my list.

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