This week is a little strange. All of my reading of late has been focused on the seminar I had this afternoon (although I still don't feel like I read enough for it). The rest of the week is very quiet, even by the standards of my course with its low contact hours. I have an hour's worth of Italian on Wednesday and a seminar about library resources on Thursday. That's it.
My intention is to use the time to get cracking on one of my essays. In theory, it's a fairly straight forward review essay but, that said, I've never had to write one before. A head start is probably, therefore, a good thing. It's only 3000 words so I could do a first draft fairly quickly. It would be nice, for a moment, to feel I was ahead of the curve rather than struggling to keep up.
I'm also instigating a programme of rewarding myself for reading a boring essay with an interesting one. In practice, this means that for everything I read about historiographical issues, I get to read something else about Renaissance prostitutes or something. I am currently sending articles about Lucrezia Borgia's finances to the printer for reward reading.
This system should prove actively helpful next semester. I'm not doing my directed reading module until January which means that unlike most of my MLitt colleagues, my second semester is going to be much heavier work-wise than the first. If I can get ahead on the reading for that (which is broadly the stuff I am specifically interested in anyway), next term might not feel so overwhelming. That's the idea, anyway.
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