with another member of my committee yesterday. While this one went really well (which is good because she’s a bit of an intimidating person) she added a ton of stuff to my nineteenth century British literature list, which included another eight or nine novels, another five plays, a ton of poetry and contemporaneous non-fiction, not to mention a number of secondary sources and she’s keen to add more non-fiction and secondary sources. Needless to say, I was feeling a little stressed when I left her office yesterday afternoon. However, I remind myself that I’ve chosen this life. If I want my PhD, if I want to continue to teach at the university level, this is something that I’ve got to do.

So since my exams are tentatively scheduled for the end of August, I’m going to set up weekly goals for myself of things that I need to get read. So, even though it’s Friday, here are my reading goals for this week (to be completed by Sunday):

• H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
• H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Excerpted chapters of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the
  Species and Descent of Man
• Thomas Henry Huxley’s Prolegomena chapter from Evolution and
  Ethics
  These are all relatively short (and while all of this is on my 19th century British Literature list this is the reading that I need to finish for class on the 1890s that I’m sitting in on)

Keep your fingers crossed that I remain a sane and friendly person throughout this process. Seven months and counting until my exams….